The girl in the mirror in front of me determinedly held a curtsey while in the presence of two different older servant women with judging looks in their eyes. Her face was a young demure thing and tilted downwards, though the light glinted off her grayish-blue eyes in just the right way that they shone in the reflection. Curly brown hair fell to her shoulders, pairing quite well with the soft red of her conservative dress.
Her name was Isabella II if you went by the name her late mother gave her during their dying moments to honor their grandmother, Isabella. Just about everyone else called her Yolanda though as had been decided to be her name by her father, not that I’d be following that same unspoken command myself. I knew her by Isabella first and thus she would stay Isabella in my mind. She was the eight year old Queen of Jerusalem due to the strange capricious laws of succession even if her father, Jean of Brienne, may as well have been the king due to how long he’d been her regent since her birth. It was complicated.
Just like how my feelings about the girl were quite complicated at the moment. As she was right now, she was as cute as a button with her face scrunched up in concentration while she held the curtsey with shaking legs.
In a way, it was like she was one of my nieces posing for a picture. Only instead, she was posing to a mirror to practice the welcoming curtsey she was supposed to use to greet the wonderful Bishop with who’d be coming by later today for his weekly visit to continue her lessons on the scriptures since it was something the young queen was expected to know.
Just a bit of a different situation compared to my nieces and I found myself feeling a tad jealous of them right now.
I suppose that wasn't exactly surprising though considering they had far more freedoms than me at the moment and had access to the wonders of modern amenities.
Being the Queen of Jerusalem really wasn’t all it was cracked out to be.
I didn’t even have the luxury of understanding how in the world it had happened. One moment I had been prepared to dedicate an entire afternoon towards a playthrough of Crusader Kings II that I’d likely never finish. The next I was waking up in Isabella’s body and being assaulted by a deluge of memories that initially I didn’t consider to be my own which then somehow became my own memories being remembered halfway through the process.
The whole thing that had occurred just this morning still wasn’t something I could make sense of, not that I particularly wanted to remember the moment.
For memories being such ethereal things, having eight years - a few years less in reality due to the fickleness of a baby's memory - worth of them shoved into your head all at once really was really quite unpleasant. Or if I were to use more modern language, it was fucking anguish and agony for the better part of ten minutes. It had left the servants wondering if they should call for an exorcism when they found me convulsing slightly while my mind was still trying to process a cram session that would put even the most panicked of college students before exam day to shame.
Thankfully, I had recovered in time to assure them I was fine and disabuse them of the notion I needed an exorcism.
The only thing I did know was that the whole awakening as Isabella thing had occurred the moment I had pressed the start game button with cute ol’ Isabella selected as my ruler. All because I thought it’d be an interesting challenge for the run to try playing as her and make something of the very disadvantageous start.
You’d think starting as the Queen of Jerusalem within the game would be filled with advantages. And in some ways, it was. Two different Holy Orders within your territory, a small kingdom where you owned some powerful fiefs and a majority of the castles, and few power hungry vessels to contend with.
But that was ignoring a few major facts. Like Jerusalem, as in the city? Firmly not something under your purview and instead underneath the purview of the Ayyubids which casually owned nearly all the land surrounding you and were strong enough to crush you if they really felt like it by themselves.
Friendly neighbors? Well Antioch and Armenia were friendlyish even if Antioch had a four year old girl with a regent just like me. With everyone else remotely nearby and not on an island being massive Muslim countries. Not that there was anything wrong with that, just that twelve-hundred twenty was very much still the era of the crusades and tensions were incredibly high between Catholicism and Islamism.
A powerful noble house to back you up? Nope! There were only three living members of the de Brienne house and two of them were Isabella and her father who on account of being a leader in the fifth crusades that were due to end in disaster in a few years, wasn’t here right now. The third member of her house was probably in France somewhere, though I hadn’t paid that much attention to whoever they were before starting the game and Isabella’s memories had absolutely nothing on them.
And being a girl in the game came with its own slew of problems. Not nearly as pronounced as it would be in reality of course, especially as a ruler. But a straight opinion malus with everyone who owned land underneath you isn’t exactly great.
In the game it would’ve been fun to make the start work despite all that. It was considerably less fun when you were actually living the history which was far more ruthless than the game could ever be since there were limitations to what they could program and concerns of balance.
I had even checked out Isabella II’s history in real life too out of an interest to see what fate I was going to be subverting. It wasn’t pretty. She got shafted pretty hard, both literally and figuratively. Betrothed at eleven to Frederick II the Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire just so he’d participate in a damn crusade, married and probably pregnant at thirteen, had a child who died as an infant at fourteen, then had a second child at sixteen where she then shortly died from complications a few days later.
It was a bleak fate, though considered pretty normal in this day and age apart from the whole me being the queen without a husband thing for longer than normal thing. It really didn’t help that I was a twenty-six year old man before all this living in the 21st century with all the wonders and worldviews that it brought with me.
At least all the other pressing current and future problems helped distract from the whole new gender and body thing I was unwilling to touch with a ten-foot pole right now.
But as I stared into the mirror at the strained face of the girl that I wasn’t while still holding the curtsey I hadn’t been told yet to drop, I knew I wouldn’t take a fate like that lying down. I had the power of modern day knowledge on my side and a perspective on history, both of which I didn’t particularly know how to make use of since I hadn’t been planning for any of this nor been somebody who would’ve cared about either before this. Surely if I just waited for the right moment, I could somehow turn this fucked up new life I found myself living around. Surely.
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There was definitely no delusion at all in my mental voice telling me that because that would be silly for me to be delusional. But even if I hypothetically was, it was better than dwelling on everything that once was and probably getting a firsthand experience on exorcisms from the experts who pioneered it.
I mean, it wasn’t like my old life had been ripped away from me after all the hard work I had put into it. And that my friends and former family just straight up didn’t exist where I was anymore. No siree!
Plus on the bright side, I got a free pass at learning a new language and culture without having to do the work myself. Not sure it being French would be my first choice, but it was something!
Now if only that had included any idea on how to parse through anything written in French and do it myself. I knew the letters were the same, but it was a shot in the dark what any of the accents or grammatical changes French used compared to English.
Or really thinking about it, the weirdness of Ye Olde English and presumably Ye Olde French too and all the strange changes I had no idea about. It being all in cursive from what I had glimpsed at a book in Isabella's father’s collection was just a fun additional challenge since I hadn’t cared about cursive since high school.
Being able to half read things was better than not being able to read at all. And I’m sure I’d be able to convince the bishop coming by today that furthering my studies from the weird tales on virtue and sin he’d been teaching Isabella before would be easy.
Compared to the average person and probably many nobles, I was practically a scholar with what I knew! Said knowledge being mostly useless apart from math just made it esoteric knowledge!
I’d just have to prove myself to be more attentive to him when he came by. Easy.
With the plan decided in my head, I was confident I could take the first step to change Isabella’s fate here which was essentially my fate now too. All without going crazy from the exceptional circumstances that brought me here.
If I had to hold this curtsey any longer though, I might really lose it. Seriously, was it really going to be expected of me to hold this for an entire minute?
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Bishop Érrard nodded in approval at the polite manners of the young queen curtseying to greet him. She had improved by leaps and bounds compared to the last week he had seen her. It was more than he expected of the girl.
He motioned for her to relax as a servant closed the door behind him, leaving them alone in the currently absent study of the girl's father, Jean de Brienne’s. “Young Yolanda, it is good to see you in good health still, blessed be the Lord for this gift. Are you prepared for your lessons this week?” The words left him with a touch of pride.
His life here was great. Here he was teaching the young queen of his country once more as a break from redeeming all the infidels that infested the cities here. Really, the only way his life could be more fulfilling was if he was teaching a young king instead of a useless girl who’d been crowned queen in lieu of anybody else.
It really was a shame that her half-brother and his mother both had passed away under ‘mysterious circumstances’ not so long ago. The boy hadn’t been old enough for him to really begin to teach, but he had been looking forward to it nonetheless.
At least he didn’t have to spend any time preparing the lessons for the young girl. She was a curious thing that asked far too many inane questions about his lesson when she wasn’t asking if they could end early so she could play, but his lesson was only on the very basics anyways. He was used to her annoyances and they were the childish sort of questions he could easily answer with nary an effort spent.
There was something off about her though this time that he just couldn’t put his finger on when she spoke. “I am indeed prepared, Lord Bishop. What will I be learning about today?”
He let himself frown slightly, uncaring if the girl saw it, before taking a seat in the study’s sole chair. He gestured for her to sit on the ground while pondering just what it was he had noticed. Then it dawned on him what exactly his mind has unconsciously been picking up on. The girl was just simply being far more formal and not trying to wiggle her way out of his lesson like she usually did at the beginning of them.
He wondered how exactly the servants here had managed that and thanked them in his head. This would make the time he had to set aside for her lessons just a bit more bearable.
“Well Yolanda, today you’ll be learning about the great dangers that lie behind the sixth deadly sin of Invidia, better known as Envy. Let me begin with a tale of how this wicked emotion can poison even the greatest of souls.”
And so Érrard began to weave his tale and lesson to the girl in front of him. It was a work of fiction he was making up on the spot but nobody would call him out if the girl misunderstood the lesson he was giving her because of that. If she didn’t get it then that was her fault, not his. As long as the girl herself didn’t fall prey to the vices as they were wont to do so obviously that the entire kingdom heard about it, then he had done his job.
This time however, the girl was far more focused then she had been in previous lessons. Her constant interruptions that he thought would cease hadn’t at all. Instead her inane questions of why it mattered or why couldn’t she go out and play right now were replaced by piercing questions he’d expect from a budding young priest.
Questions that actually required effort from him to answer.
With each question he was forced to explain things in far greater detail and actually had to bother thinking on what he was saying lest someone get the idea he was purposely misleading her. Érrard could feel his own ire rising with each interruption and by the end of it he was quite impressed with himself for having fought his own particular vice this day and won.
Just as he made to leave though, the stupid girl threw him one last question. “Lord Bishop? Would it perhaps be possible for me to study the Bible like you do? The lessons are really interesting and-”
This girl wanted to study the Bible? What a joke that was.
He would not waste his time teaching the girl how to read of all things when there were far better things for him to be doing like getting the Lord's words through the thick skulls of the local populace still too stubborn to understand their false god paled in comparison to the Lord.
He turned around to face the innocent looking girl, fighting to keep too much of his ire from showing on his own face. “Yolanda. The study of the bible is not the place of girls, but boys and men who can properly understand the lessons within it. You have far better things to be focusing on like learning how to manage your future household and only need to know of the Virtues you should strive for and the Sins you should avoid so you may teach it to your future children.”
The young queen flinched back slightly, though was not nearly as cowed as he had expected. “But-”
“This is not your place! Do not ask me this again lest you wish for me to punish you in your fathers steed!” He shot out before the girl could attempt to weasel in some sort of backwards reasoning on why he should teach her that of all things.
Érrard thought he handled it all quite well as he slammed the door shut to the study. With any luck the girl would go back to her inane questions again during their lessons next week. After all, his duty did not include dealing with stupid young girls who thought themselves able to do the work of boys and men.
Queen of Jerusalem she might be right now, but she would not matter. One day Jean would find his daughter a proper husband and king for these lands. She would not matter, only her and her sons would.
He was so preoccupied with his mental venting of his ire that he didn’t even notice the grayish-blue eyes of said girl glaring daggers with far more venom and intelligence than was in them a day ago at his back from the study, the door opened to just a slit to facilitate it. Nor did he notice her bitterly muttered words, unbecoming of the young queen.
“Well, there goes that plan. Bastard.”