The wailing of an infant pulled me out of my thoughts. I had to suppress a sigh; I wasn't really cut out for this whole motherhood thing. Still, I rose from my chair and picked up the child -my son, apparently- and began murmuring sweet nothings as I gently rocked him.
"Come on, Robb, what's the matter?" I softly asked, unable to completely suppress my whining. "I just changed you an hour ago; are you hungry? Again?"
The child, like children his age do, continued to whimper and cry. Though, from the way he nuzzled into my chest, I think it was safe to assume he was hungry. Again.
I sighed and carefully worked my dress over my shoulder, baring one of my full breasts to the chilly air of the room that the fireplace wasn't quite able to adequately warm.
Robb latched on and began greedily working at my nipple, eagerly gorging himself on the milk that flowed so freely from it.
'Well, I never thought I'd be doing this,' I mused once more. 'Guys aren't supposed to breastfeed…'
Except… I wasn't exactly a guy anymore.
I still have no clue how it happened. I was just a regular, average guy one day, then I went to sleep, and the next thing I know, I woke up in the body of a woman. I was not transformed into a woman, since I didn't wake up in my old apartment, either. No, I'd woken up in the family wing of a castle called Winterfell.
Oh, and the cherry on top? Apparently, this body had given birth the night before.
From what the resident scholar slash doctor had told me, apparently my body had suffered a high fever and some complications from the birth; it was severe enough that the denizens had feared she wouldn't survive the night.
Those are the consequences of giving birth at 18 years old in a medieval society, unfortunately.
Now, this was pure speculation on my part, but I suspected that the poor young woman hadn't survived the night. And, I suspected, something had happened to my original self after I'd gone to sleep that night as well. The exact mechanics were beyond me (some kind of magic? Transmigration? Cosmic accident? Who knows?) but however it happened, I had somehow taken over the body and life of Catelyn Stark, nee Tully.
"There there, all done?" I rhetorically asked the young infant in my arms. Having had his fill, he finally released my breast and was staring up at me with huge blue eyes.
I couldn't help but to smile down at him. I'd always had a soft spot for children, though I hadn't had any of my own before arriving here. Despite not, technically, being this child's mother (in mind and spirit, even if I was by blood), I'd quickly grown fond of the little guy. Perhaps it was the body's hormones at work, but I was growing to love this child. Which was, by all accounts, a very good thing.
"Come on, then," I murmured to the child. Shifting him around so that I could lay a cloth over my shoulder, I adjusted baby Robb so I could burp him. Gently, I began rhythmically patting his back. If he happened to spit up on me (again), well, that was what the cloth was for.
Still, it had taken two weeks of contemplation and adjustment to even start to come to terms with my new circumstances. And there were a lot of changes to adjust to, the least of which was my change in gender.
'Coming to the realization that you're probably not on Earth anymore is a pretty big adjustment,' I sardonically thought.
I was a bit of an amateur historian. While I hadn't pursued any degrees or the like in the subject (having had to work for a living from a young age, and missing out on the opportunity to go to college), I had spent more than a little of my free time learning about history. I had a particular fascination with languages, cultural practices, economics, and technologies, and how those things had affected the course of events, and were affected by them in turn.
After two weeks of living in this new life, there were two things I was absolutely sure of. First, the 'common tongue', as it is known here, didn't match any particular linguistic group I was familiar with. To the best of my self-taught linguistic knowledge, it was like a bizarre mixture of old Hungarian and old Gaelic, but it used a plethora of prefixes and suffixes like classical Latin or archaic Greek to modify words. Especially verbs; a slight change in prefix could determine if the verb applied to the subject or to the object in a sentence. Back when I'd taken French classes in high school, I had thought that language's verb conjugations were complicated. French, however, was simple and straightforward compared to the common tongue. I counted myself extremely fortunate that whatever cosmic accident put me in this body allowed me to retain the lion's share of the young woman's memories and knowledge, especially her knowledge of language and writing.
Which brings me to my second major realization; the geography in this place was completely unlike anything I was familiar with at any time in human existence on Earth. Furthermore, it was so different that it was impossible for this to be the past, and unless my knowledge and understanding of plate tectonics was way wrong, there was no way for the continents I was familiar with to change shape into the continents displayed on the world maps I had seen since coming here. Not without the better part of a billion years of change, but if that was the case, humans wouldn't be human anymore by that point.
As such, I had come to the conclusion that I was not, in fact, on Earth anymore. Not in the past, and not in the future. Besides, the stars were all different. I wasn't as enamored with astronomy as I was with history, but I knew how to recognize many of the major constellations. Orion, Taurus, a few of the zodiacs… none of which were in this place's night skies. For the constellations to change enough to be completely unrecognizable would take almost as much time as it would take to change the continents. In other words, completely out of the realm of possibility.
So yeah. I woke up as a recently wedded 18 year old girl, who had just given birth. All while her husband, a major Lord in a feudal society, was off fighting a rebellion against a mad tyrant.
'I am so lucky I have Catelyn's memories, ' I told myself once more.
The memories were, for lack of a better term, flat. They didn't carry much emotional weight, if any at all, when I recalled them. Of course, I'd spent most of my first few days here delving into those memories, trying to get a feel for who Catelyn Tully had been.
Family, Duty, Honor. The Tully family motto. Catelyn had internalized those words from a young age, and had sought to live by them with everything she did. She was smart, if not what I would consider well educated. Though, considering this was a medieval society, I doubted anyone outside the Maesters could be considered educated by my standards. Catelyn was dutiful, obedient, and pious; a devout follower of the Seven. I, at best, could be called agnostic, with a bias towards atheism, so I doubted I'd be able to carry on her piety moving forward. Still, in part to not arouse suspicion, and in part to honor the life of the young woman whose body I'd accidentally stolen, I vowed to at least attempt to carry her values with me moving forward.