Chapter Text
5 of April, 1185
On that night, the moon was on a waning crescent, and underneath its dim light, Baldwin V played with a small wooden camel and a crucifix. Standing on the entrance to the room, arms crossed over her chest, his mother Sibylla of Jerusalem observed his playtime in silence, and only intervened after a severe cough interrupted the child’s play, rendering the camel still on the floor, on top of the cross.
She shushed his cough away as she carried him to the enormous bed, fitted more for a king than for a child. But of course, her son technically was a king, and she could do nothing but wince at the thought. As she laid him with care in the bed, the cough refusing to abandon little Baldwin’s lugs, Sibylla couldn’t help but to notice the eerie similarities between her son and her brother; not only in the comparison between their names, or their looks before his brother’s illness ate away at his face and body, or the burden that had been inherited to them, but also in how little Baldwin writhed and squirmed in the bed, unable to stop his cough, as if their names were cursed with the evil of illness.
Little by little, the young regent’s cough came to a halt, falling asleep in the arms of his mother. Sibylla didn’t move from the bed, despite being trapped in a position where one of her legs was going numb. Nowadays, there weren’t many occasions where she could be alone with her son, for he was always under the watchful eye of her granduncle. As she caressed the sweaty blonde locks of his boy away from his face, she cursed her brother under her breath for bestowning the burden upon her son and not upon herself, for said burden didn’t only included a kingdom that was in the brink of destruction and invasion, but also the inevitable worsening of little Baldwin’s condition.
A cloud covered the moon and the room fell into darkness, as the dethroned sister of the king fell asleep next to her son.