Fake Cinderella

(It"s really a miracle no matter how many times I think about it….)
I sat down on a chair prepared on the balcony and absent-mindedly gazed at the lake.
On the first day of waking up, there was no way I could be let out of the bed.
After that, I was allowed to stay up inside the room, but of course, there was no way they would let me go outside, so yesterday after I went out in the hallway for a little bit to get fresh air, I started walking down the hallway while observing the pictures hung in the corridor and got lost inside of this large castle.
Just when I thought that I somehow managed to go back near my room, I instinctively started running after getting chased by st.u.r.dy men dressed in extremely bizarre outfits, strayed in the castle, got dizzy and backtracked to the bed.
(Those people were probably looking for me, right?…probably)
They were wearing such crazy outfits that I unknowingly ran away though.
It probably turned into a big ordeal.
but I had fainted so I"m not aware of the details.
(I"m sorry, I won"t get out in the hallway without permission anymore)
Muttering the words of apology inside my heart, I let out a small sigh.
I shouldn"t have done something like slipping out of my room after such an incident.
….I didn"t have intentions to slip out, but as a result, I did get lost so I can"t make up excuses even if others think that I snuck out of the room.
It"s also not surprising that Lilia thoroughly warned me to not leave the room.
It"s because I have reflected that I"ve been obediently sitting like this in a chair since the morning.
(Somehow, I feel like I"ve turned into a doll)
The scene before me is as beautiful as a painting.
Vibrant blue sky, a deep forest can be seen on the opposite bank.
Great Forest of Serard…It"s the biggest woodland in Dardinia and more than the half of its trees exceed the age of five hundred years. It is said that there are the ruins from the age of the old empire deep in this great woodland.
(The scenery is beautiful, but…)
I can"t enjoy it earnestly. The air somehow feels oppressive, and I find it unpleasant.
My current room is on the 1st floor, but even falling down from the balcony that"s hung overhead the lake is very dangerous and just thinking about that somehow makes me want to shrink back.
Even just looking from a safe place like this, makes me deeply feel just how fortunate I was.
I was honestly very lucky to have survived.
It seems like I"ve been unconscious for a week, but of course, I don"t remember it.
Despite sleeping for a week, I didn"t feel anything wrong with my body.
On the first day I woke up, I felt sore all over the place because I had been sleeping for a long time, but now I feel just fine. I only have some bruises but no injuries or anything like that.

(The person who tried to kill me must be feeling very surprised right now)

The balcony where Alterie is said to have fallen from is at the edge of the 3rd floor. The maids stressed that it was absolutely not a place where Alterie would go alone.
To start with, that is a playroom.
It has games like billiards and darts and is a place where after evening parties, male partic.i.p.ants can play games while enjoying tobacco. Of course, on the day of the accident, it wasn"t being used. Besides, the playroom is a place where females enter very rarely.
And it"s also not a place where the girl who knew that it was a playroom would go alone even if she knew that there wasn"t anybody there.
That being the case, the possibility of it being a coincidental accident becomes extremely low.
In the first place, Alterie isn"t a child who would go anywhere alone.
From the very young age, she has been raised as the Princess Consort. She probably wouldn"t even think of an idea of going anywhere alone. The accident from yesterday happened because『I』was the one inside her body.
That"s why it"s impossible for her to have fallen from a place where she absolutely wouldn"t have entered, while none of her guards or accompanying maids noticed.
Lilia and the others wouldn"t openly say it out loud, but I think that Alterie was kidnapped by somebody and thrown off from the veranda.
Duke Elsevelt"s side is desperately trying to mask it as an『accident』, but this is actually an『incident』
And in addition, it"s a splendid『Case of attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of the Princess Consort』
There"s also an after-effect of me trying to escape, but there"s no wonder that Lilia and the guards are so tense.
(It would be easy if I remembered…but…there also isn"t a deciding evidence that it wasn"t an accident, so…)
I came to a slightly unpleasant thought so I shook my head as if trying to get rid of the idea.
At the end of my sight, the white castle reflected on the lake"s surface shook.
The castle built on top of the lake might look very beautiful in a painting, but essentially it seems unusable.
The only thing connecting the castle"s small island to the rest of the land is a single drawbridge that requires three grown men to raise and lower.
Well, it gets raised and lowered every morning. It makes an awful sound so there are times when it wakes me up too. It makes such an amazing sound that once I thought the lightning hit when I heard the sound of the bridge lowering.
(….They should just oil it up when they"re raising it)
No, but maybe oiling can"t really do much at this point though.
As I sighed and turned back after feeling a presence, Lilia approached me.
“Would you like some tea?”
I nodded enthusiastically.

Maybe because such accident happened, the daily time flows leisurely.
When I wake up in the morning, first I wash my face and fix my hair.
After that, it takes about 40 to 50 minutes to finish changing.
Oh, as for the unit of time, you can read ‘minute" as Din(ディン) and the ‘time" as Dida(ディダ). There are still 24 hours in a day.
There are also clocks, but the numbers are slightly different from Arabic numerals. Well,  I can still read it so it"s not a problem.
After I"m done with dressing up in the morning, I have breakfast for about 30 minutes. Apparently, it"s something that should be lasting for a longer time, but it"s just a meal alone. It doesn"t take much time.
After the meal, it"s time to receive greetings, but the only who has come to me after I woke up was the Duke, my father.
Even if I call him father, Alterie has been living in the royal palace since she was 7 months old, so the perception that she"s this person"s daughter must be pretty weak for her. They have never spent time together and after morning"s greeting, they don"t meet for the rest of the day.
There is no other person who comes to greet me and there is also no need for me to go and greet somebody body.
Lilia said that it"s because in this castle there isn"t anybody with a high enough status to request an audience with me and the only ones I would need to personally greet are the royal couple and the Crown Prince, my husband. Though, I was told that I"ve been exempted even from that with my age as a reason.
(Rather, it feels more like a neglected state)
So, after the greetings are done, it"s the free time.
Perhaps there would be practices and stuff in the royal palace at this time, but this place, though it is my house, has no such things.
There are only several maids including Lilia around me.
They belong to the Royal Palace and even their uniform is different. Only the Royal Palace maids are permitted to wear black.
Their manager is, as expected, Lilia who has been appointed as the official lady-in-waiting at the young age of 20. Apparently, she"s a daughter of the Viscount responsible for administrating the taxation on the territory under the direct control of the Royal family.
She feels a lot of responsibility for the accident and she tells me, who has supposedly lost my voice, various stories.
I think that she"s trying hard to make me regain my voice ─── my words, even a little bit.
Previous Alterie also was a quiet child who didn"t talk much, but it wasn"t like she didn"t talk at all.
Quiet and unable to speak might be the same if you look at the result, but they mean absolutely different things.
(….I"m sorry, that I"m not speaking)
I know that I"m Alterie.
As long I"m here, this is my current reality.
But…the reason why I"m not opening my mouth while convincing myself that it"s for the sake of confirming the situation, might be because I still haven"t admitted that.
It seems that according to the doctor"s diagnosis, Alterie has lost her ability to speak along with her memories due to the shock of the accident. I"m using “seems” because I can"t confirm it since I don"t speak.
If I say even one word, I would have to make up my mind.
I know that I"m Alterie.
I also understand the situation I"m in considerably well.
….But, I still don"t have the determination to proactively live as Alterie in this world.
(I"m just indecisive, ain"t I?…)
Alterie is cute. She has an exceptional lineage, moreover, a status as the Princess Consort. If I act well, I will probably live well in this world too.
There"s some risk too, but speaking of only in terms of conditions, the incomparably good conditions aligned here compared to my original world.
Still, I can"t enter the current world without thinking it over.

(Even though I can"t go back)

Somehow, I already knew it for some reason.
At that time, probably my ─── Izumi Maya"s life was lost.
And I think that my soul was reborn as Alterie.
(…No matter how I think about, the possibility of this is very high)
In manga and such, there are stories where people become ghosts and possess another body, but in those cases, the original soul is usually still present. The current me is different. There is only a single soul in this body.
(Well, I can"t do anything about that though…)
I let out a sigh.
Since I woke up, everything has been beyond my powers so I keep sighing.
(It"s okay because of the doctor"s convenient diagnosis about the memory loss, but…)
For a little while, I can play off any strange conduct as the result of the shock from falling.
Besides, Alterie seems to have been quite tight-lipped.
(I mean, she even had a “Doll Princess” as a nickname)
The nickname that the servants gave to Alterie is『​Doll Princess』, though I think there were also some people who called her 『Ice Princess』…Anyway, I can more or less imagine what kind of child she was.
I was thinking if that was some kind of crime of disrespect, but, well, I used to do the same thing in the story. Like, making up code names for the people in the main office or the store manager.
After all, there"s no way to make excuses if you"re overheard talking about other people while openly saying their names.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting.”

A nice smell came from the wagon that Lilia brought in.
The moment I saw freshly baked Financier

and Madeleines
 I unintentionally smiled.
Hooray~ it looks delicious.
“Princess…”
Lilia"s movement stopped for a second.
I slightly tilted my head and looked at her.
“No, it"s nothing. Please enjoy.”
I nodded enthusiastically. At this time, I couldn"t even think that Lilia was surprised at my smile.
In the end, it just shows just how much of a doll Alterie was.
(Mmmh~delicious! Uwaa, the person who made this is a genius! I want to know the recipe!)
A beautiful, fox-colored Financier is made exquisite with plenty of better and reserved sweetness.
For such baked sweets, not letting the fox-color change into charred is the most difficult. Even if the usage of sweetness has been reserved, as long as you"re using sugar, it"s easy to burn it.
(Mmmh~ but rather than sugar, this is honey, isn"t it?…yeah, probably. It"s honey.)
It has a slightly specific sweet taste. But they used milk so it"s a good kind of specific taste. What a perfect balance!
While drinking freshly brewed, beautiful amber-colored tea, I extended my hand towards the second one.
(I wonder what this green thing is?…spinach? mugwort? This country probably…doesn"t have matcha, right?)
Green-colored Financier. I think it"s some vegetable"s leaf. This bitter-sweet taste is delicious.
“That is a Financier of Zade, which is high in nutrition.”
For some reason, Lilia explained happily.
Oh, I see, I thought while deliciously eating. I wonder why I feel so happy after eating sweets? It"s very mysterious.
(What to do? should I take the third one? or should I stop eating?….)
I"m not the age when I would need to be concerned about dieting, but I will also be troubled if I can"t eat lunch.
“This is a carrot but it doesn"t really taste like one”
(I don"t particularly mind carrots, but I wonder if Alterie hated them…)
Thinking “oh well, whatever”, I reached for the 3rd one.
The original faint sweetness of the carrot is quite delicious.
The person who made this is a master! I almost want to become their disciple!
Making full use of the original taste of the vegetables and turning it into tasty sweets.
It will definitely sell well if we put this up for a sale! Oh, but sugar seems valuable so I guess it will be impossible cost performance-wise.
Later on, there will be a slight fuss about those sweets but at this time I obviously didn"t know anything and in the end, ate five almonds and raisins in total.
For some reason, all the maids looked satisfied.

—
Notes
Holy f.u.c.k, this was so long compared to what it looked like (5.2k characters, pretty much the size of longer chapters of the witch), but it"s time to give this baby some love too.
I always think that I"d like to do 2 chapters to this and 1 chapter of the witch to get things going but I keep forgetting that they"re pretty much the same length…

Oh well, at least we got some sweets this time.

The playroom is written as 遊戯室, but essentially it"s just a glorified man cave.
There are so many vague sentences in this chapter, like  娘という感覚は薄いんだろう which is literally something like “feeling as a daughter must be faint”
lady-in-waiting is 女官
I have no f.u.c.king clue what the second part really means tbh 一言で言ってしまえば、ふんぎりがつかないでいるのだ。
oh yeah, the t.i.tle is 人形姫 doubles with Alterie"s nickname. 人形 can be both puppet and doll but I went with the doll instead.

G.o.d, I f.u.c.king hate how vague those sentences are or how repet.i.tive the author gets with their information, like with Alterie being quiet

Anyway, I mostly use google to translate so please tell me about any mistranslations, typos, awkward grammar you find so I could fix it afap.