16th February, Brandenburg, Prussia

1511

{ chapter i: daisy night }

I began my new life with terrible weather. Which is typical, really— I should have taken it as a sign and chosen to stay in bed instead. But I didn't. Because I'm an idiot. Which you'll come to find is a recurring theme throughout my story, so be patient with me.

I woke up on a damp blanket, my eyes stapled shut by the rough hands of exhaustion. I felt like I was hovering between awake and sleep. There was something fuzzy clouding my brain, like cotton. But I didn't feel worried. I felt like I was on the verge of blissful confusion.

My socks were wet.

That was the first clear thought I had. The second was that it was raining. Not a lot, but enough to make my clothes itchy and sticky. That annoyed me.

So I sat up and found I wasn't on a blanket. I was on a thick layer of flowers— White ones, with yellow buttons. Daisies, maybe. But I didn't know that much about flowers. Ironically. It was so wet my entire back was damp, and I smelt like a bag of mulch.

The shy sounds of birds filled my ears, and I lifted my eyes to my surroundings.

What the hell.

It was an impossible expanse of white. Daisies everywhere, like some kind of out of control disease. The sky was white with oppressing clouds, and at the edges of the horizon were . . . Trees? It was the height of spring in some foreign land. And being a teenager who'd never stepped foot outside of my own country, at one glance I could see that this was definitely not my backyard. It was a flower field. In the middle of a forest. In the middle of some property, in some country, in some universe. My head hurt.

I found I could reach down and squeeze a clump of flowers in my fingers, and the petals crushed against my skin and wilted in the force, but that only proved only one thing: This was the strongest dream I'd had yet.

I wasn't a stranger to hyper realistic dreams, in fact they were a very intimate friend of mine. The greatest danger in my life was meeting a person and then spending the next year wondering if I'd dreamt them up or if they were actually real. So my therapist told me that if I wasn't sure, I should focus on something tangible. Then again, maybe I'd dreamt up my therapist, too.

What was the last thing I could remember?

My hand, my memory answered. I lifted them both up, staring at the backs for any inconsistencies. There was nothing different. The same pale freckled skin, peppered with dark hair. I had hands like my mother's, clean tips and long bones— Except hers were darker. Tanned from pulling at weeds in the garden all day, insisting the work was never done. I turned my hands over.

There. The tattoo. I had gotten it when I was sixteen after experiencing the worst hyper dream I'd ever had. It was no bigger than a bottle cap, circular, with thick black lines and a delicate outer ring of flowers. "Pussywillows," the tattoo artist had told me. I remember shrugging. I just thought it looked cool.

But now, it didn't take a long look to recognise that something was wrong. It was fading, a great deal faster than a two-year-old tattoo should. It looked ten years old. And somehow, somehow I knew that the more it faded, the worse this would get.

Whatever this was.

My mind jolted back to the forest, and no matter how much I blinked, I was still there. Okay. Okay, no need to panic. I'll just stand up and follow the treeline. There have to be houses close by, maybe there's a freeway on the other side of the trees. I'll flag down a car and get a lift back to my town. Easy.

As I walked, I patted down my pockets. Half a stick of gum, a five cent coin. My driver's license. At least I had a jacket, this place was colder than any place I'd ever been. My fingers were turning blue and red and white, like the Australian flag.

I felt bad about stepping on the flowers— Something in my moral backbone was wailing at the concept of tainting the field with my Vans. I tried to balance on my heels to crush as few as possible. After all, this was the most beautiful dream I'd ever been in. It was like an oil painting, or a black-and-white photo. And I was ruining it by carving a path through the daisies.

After all, I was a flower too. Posy. As I looked behind me, I could see the place I'd woken up. A sad little depression in the field. Well, not Woken up. This was the dream, after all. I had yet to wake up. So until then, I'd just humour my messed up head.

I was nearly nineteen years old. I was still obsessed with reggae and blues, and I lived with my three sisters and my mother on the dirtier end of the suburbs. Where stripped cars sat like skeletons in abandoned lots, feral cats crawled underneath the houses to breed and no one finished school. I'd tried in school, I really had. But when I turned sixteen things had taken a turn for the worst— And my health became everyone's problem.

One-thousand and nine vivid dreams. I'd recorded every single one. In journals stacked in boxes under my bed, in my cupboard, in the basement of the house. Like some divination goblin.

I remember being angry all the time. Angry with people for not being patient enough, or not being fast enough. Angry with myself for being so unsure. I'd talk about past events with my sisters, only for them to shrug and tell me I'd dreamt it all up again. I'd mention old conversations with my mother, and when she didn't understand I'd get frustrated all over again. I couldn't differentiate between real people and fake, I'd make lists of names and test myself to determine which ones existed.

I was a legitimate crazy person. Living two different lives. Awake and asleep. The first life, the one I'd been born into, had only existed for four-thousand, three-hundred and ninety-one days. The remaining one-thousand and nine were in an entirely different world.

And that night, the Daisy night, made one-thousand and ten.

I heard voices. Following the treeline for an hour, three hours, two hundred hours, whatever— They bounced between the pines and managed to skip their way back to me. My tired feet dragged my tired body toward them. Like a moth seeing a porchlight.

I was a very tired moth.

The smell of pine was burning my nose. I had to give it to my imagination. It was really putting every effort into this dream, making it as believable as possible. I had no idea I even knew what pine smelt like.

" . . . Says it'll take time," one voice finished. His words rose over the strange thumping of what may have been drums. Band practice in the middle of a forest? Weird, but I'd seen weirder.

"They'll be distracted at the wedding," he went on. "Leaving everyone else wide open."

"It'll be crawling with junkers," another person snapped. I could see their shadows moving, stretching up the trees as they walked around a light source. My shoes shuffled through the fallen leaves, creeping up on a rise. The voices were coming from a pit. "It'll be a wasp nest and we'll be the boot."

"A poor comparison from you, Conrad," the first man sneered. "Lucky for you, he'll make sure we're far away from the worst of them. At the ball."

As I grew closer, the strangers grew in number. From two voices arguing, I could make out four more, then ten more. Until I could barely hear what Conrad and the unnamed man were saying. It was like trying to listen to bees arguing.

The source of light was a bonfire, relatively tame in size. There were men scattered around it, arguing gruffly with one another. I saw a collection of bricks at the back of the pit— A well? It looked very small, barely six feet deep, with a steel lid keeping the wildlife out. I also saw the glint of metal lying casually in the pit with the men. My chest tightened. Weapons. Was this another dream where I ended up dying? Where I accidentally interrupt their secret meeting, and get promptly stabbed to death by these random cultish band kids?

Oh, well. I may as well get it over with, I suppose.

I straighten, despite my hammering heart. This was going to hurt. Dream-dying always did. I waved my arms a little, but the men in the pit didn't notice me. They were consumed by their arguments, comparing swords that look uncomfortably real, and tugging on scraggly pubescent beards. None of these guys could've been older than twenty-five.

That observation gave me a little hope. I could probably break their spirit by pointing out their acne. No harm done, I wake up from this dream trauma free and have cake for breakfast. Unless my siblings had eaten it all.

I sighed and waved my arms again, a little more frantically. Nothing. If I'm supposed to die in this dream, why was it suddenly so damn hard? Did I have to beg for it? Oh please, psychotic brain of mine, I long to be assaulted by the urban band kids . . .

I cupped my hands around my mouth. "HEY!"

That worked.

They snapped their heads toward me, like they were all controlled by the same marionette strings. My confidence faltered. Suddenly their swords had doubled in number. Oh shit.

"A GIRL!" One shrieked.

A malnourished tween! I almost shouted back. But by then they had begun storming up the rise, heading right for me.

Dream be damned, I ran for my life. Thank God I wasn't wearing jeans or a skirt, or my fake pursuers would have been upon me in moments. I'd instead gone to sleep in an old sundress, yellow and light with spaghetti stains on the skirt. My jacket was green cotton, nothing incredible, and you get used to sleeping in shoes very quickly. After a lifetime of stumbling through dreams in your underwear and a Chewbacca shirt, you learn to dress accordingly— Namely, for a long night of running.

My feet skidded on the leaves and heaved uphill. I wove between the trees, the sounds of angry men building to a crescendo behind me. Maybe shouting at them was a bad idea. Maybe I should have stayed in the field and waited to return to my room.

There's a lot of maybes I'm considering right now, but none of them are going to get me the hell out of there.

I threw my arm out and hooked it around a trunk, using it as a pivot to change direction. Only as my hand slammed into the wood, the pain— The pain that rocketed into my shoulder and up the side of my neck— It was more than dream-pain. It almost felt real.

Almost.

If it weren't for the glaringly obvious fact that this was all impossible (Waking up in an entirely different environment to the one you went to sleep in) I would almost believe all of this. But there was absolutely no way any of this was real.

And yet, the way my arm felt like it had been crushed beneath a fridge . . .

No.

I cradled it against my chest, huffing through the pain, and kept running, albeit considerably weaker than before. Every jolt of movement sent the bones in my forearm grating against each other. It almost distracted me enough that I didn't hear the singing some thirty feet away from me.

Singing? Singing.

It came from my right, and it sounded weirdly familiar. Whoever they were, they hadn't heard the commotion that was my highly interactive dream, or if they had noticed, didn't seem all that interested. I strained my ears, struggling to decipher the voice above the crashing of foliage under me, the shouting of the men and my own heartbeat.

"HELP!" I screamed, but it didn't sound like my own voice. Well, it did, in a way. But not completely. It was off. I was off. This whole damn ordeal is off, my brain snapped.

" . . . If you should ever leave me," the stranger sang. They were the only words I could make out.

Unfortunately, as the singing dissipated and I was left with my pursuers, I remembered that not everything was in my favour, which was just so typical.

"STOP!" The men were shouting. They sometimes changed it up with "YOU THERE!" Or, "GIRL!" Which was very interesting of them. I didn't respond, naturally. I had other things going on.

Such as the lack of ground in front of me. The forest dropped away, ending in an abrupt nothingness. I had come to a cliffside. Of course I bloody had.

I chanced a look over my shoulder and was surprised at the distance between me and my closest pursuers. Their climb out of the pit had given me some precious start time. And I needed to use it wisely.

I could run alongside the cliff, but they'd catch up with me eventually. And I couldn't count on the singer coming to my rescue. If they hadn't emerged by now, they wouldn't bother helping me when the moment called for it.

I couldn't run forever, I was sore and tired. Anyway, I was bound to wake up eventually, preferably painlessly, so I just needed to force it. Like an induced labour. I just needed to find the right drugs . . .

Peering over the cliff, I saw it ended in a river. There were a few miniature waterfalls strung along the cliff, pouring carefully into the water sixty feet below. The shock of falling should do it. It always worked. Everytime.

But what if this isn't a dream?

I looked at my arm. It was pale and crooked. I'd pushed most of the pain to the back of my mind, and now that I looked at it— Really looked at it, the head-splitting agony was beginning to make me dizzy. I was going to be sick. I needed to wake up. I needed to jump.

But what if you die?

I can't die, this is a dream.

Are you really going to risk that?

Oh my God. I glanced along the cliff. I'd only stood there contemplating everything for a moment, yet it was enough time for the cult to eat up considerable ground.

I lifted my leg and planted my shoe on a dead log. I shoved it toward the edge of the cliff. It didn't budge.

"GIRL!"

Panic seized me, and I almost forgot this was a dream. I gave the log another shove. It stayed there.

My heart was thundering in my ears. My nose burned from the smell of pine. My arm was sprained at best, broken at worst. Why didn't this feel like a typical dream? Why did I feel so damn scared? I breathed deeply. My eyes watered. Everything felt so real. How did I know what pine smelt like? How did my arm hurt so much? How did I know what pine smelt like?

I was so fixed on that particular problem, I was so frightened of what the answer meant and why it felt so terrifying to me, I almost let my chasers catch me alive.

I grit my teeth and kicked the log, bruising a few toenails in the process. The wood toppled off the cliff, sailing into the river below. I waited a few seconds for it to fall, before jumping after it.

My dress flew up, my hair streamed behind me in a wild banner and I felt like a paper plane shooting straight for the middle of the ocean. I felt like I was going to slam into the water and deteriorate. The wind was so cold and so unbelievably strong it pulled my attention away from aiming at the river below. And I knew I'd made a crucial mistake as the water soared up towards me.

I'd succeeded in breaking the water tension with the log, but I'd failed in counting the seconds before jumping. As I shot into the water, my head cracked against the resurfacing log, breaking me open like an egg and letting my mind pour out.

I forgot about the cold. I finally fell asleep.

Who were the Beach Boys? I couldn't remember any of their names.

I'd read something somewhere on those crazy fact websites that almost none of them knew how to surf, and the only one who did died drowning. It was that ironic tragedy that somehow stuck in my brain. Some of them were brothers. I think the other two were friends, or cousins.

Who were the Beach Boys?

Why don't I know any of their names?

Something warm smacked my face. My soul spasmed and emptied itself onto the ground beneath my face. It was watery and tasted like shit. I opened my eyes.

"Drank half the river, eh?" A man asked.

They'd found me. I'd stupidly knocked myself out and washed ashore, right into the skinny arms of the band kids. And I was going to rip off those arms and beat them to death with them.

I heaved myself upwards like a toddler picking up a fat cat, limbs akimbo and centre of gravity uncertain. I did the only thing I could think of in my stuffy, drowned head.

I put my dukes up.

A shouting began. But as my mind cleared it admitted to me what it actually was— Laughter. They were laughing.

One voice broke free of the others. "You a Knight, milady?" They were mocking me.

I blinked myself into focus. I was still in the forest. My heart sank. Except here the trees weren't as thick, and there was rushing water sounding behind me. I was soaking wet, my dress sticking to my frozen fish-finger body. I couldn't imagine the state of my hair. I didn't want to know.

The atmosphere was considerably darker than before. I wondered how far the field was from here, how far I'd run. And floated. I was never going to find it again. I didn't even know if it was something I should be worried about. But it was the most familiar thing so far. Besides pubescent thugs and accidental cliff diving.

"Where am I?" I asked.

The strangers laughed again, forcing my gaze back to them. I blinked at their attire. Bright linen capes and brown tights. Their hair was wild, their eyes mischievous and cunning. They all looked as frightful and manic as the other. Like ferrets stuffed into costumes. There were seven men and one girl. She looked about six. She clung to the oldest man's hand, her red cape patched with white matching his own.

"Where am I?" I repeated.

The girl spoke first. "I like your dress."

I stared at her.

The man holding her hand smiled, his grey moustache twirling further up his cheeks. "Would you care to hear the city or the province?"

A breeze swept through and my body burned with cold. I wrapped my arms around myself, and then gasped at the sudden pain. My left arm had begun to swell. It was purple and red with irritation. There was probably a handsome lump on my forehead, too. I gritted my teeth. "The country."

The blandness in my voice sobered him. "Prussia. Beside Poland, above Italy."

Prussia. That was Germany and a few other places, wasn't it? Before the first World War. Why the hell was I in Old Germany? What absolute misery had brought my head to think up this place?

And why hadn't the fall woken me up? Why hadn't the chase, or the broken arm, or the knock with the log, or the water, or the cold woken me up?

"Milady?"

I must have given him a mean look, because he put his hands up in surrender. "Have you lost your memory? You look like a drowned fish. We thought you were dead when we pulled you out."

"I was being chased," I said slowly, like I was trying to convince myself of something. "Some cult group or something. Are you actors?" I asked. "Is this a film?"

The girl tugged on the man's hand, who I'd decided must be her father, and murmured in his ear.

But another guy spoke. His hair was black and curly, and he had a beard shaved close to his jaw. He was the most handsome out of all of them. Though I wasn't sure why my mind suddenly cared about that. "We are not actors, but we do perform. We are in a circus. The Spanish Heart, maybe you've heard of us?"

Eight acrobats walk into a bar, I thought dryly.

"Sure," I relinquished. "The Spanish Heart. Are you performing for a festival?" I might as well humour these dream-people. Kill time before I woke up.

"No, we're travelling," someone else said. "I'm Inigo," he added. "Man of a thousand bodies."

Whatever that meant in circus terms, I didn't want to know. "I'm Posy. Ngaire."

"Mary?" Inigo inquired.

"Ngaire," I repeated, my irritation furthering as my brain burned with aches and my body slowly became refrigerated peanut brittle. "Nigh-ree."

Noting my drop in mood, maybe even sensing I was going to put my fists up again, the black-haired man cleared his throat. "Let's get you somewhere warm, we'll take you back to camp." The group murmured in agreement.

"I really like your dress," the girl said again. A circus girl. She belonged to a circus.

I blinked rapidly, then my hands found the ground. I sank into the soft earth.

It was time to sleep.