Nicolas Aldric (Book 2)

Full Name: Nicolas Émile Gaston Aldric

Date of Birth: 7 April 2001

Height: 6'1"

Title: His Highness Prince Nicolas.

Voice: Funny without trying to be, which is a different thing from his brothers' wit. Nothing is being aimed, he just sees the joke and says it. The honest observation arrives the same way: dropped in once, lightly, at the moment it will do the most, and then he has already moved on while the other person is still catching up. The part of him that has sharpened is the one that lives at two hundred miles an hour. His own engineers know him as the steadiest voice on the radio when the race is coming apart. The rest of the grid knows a colder man entirely — the one who waits, and then leaves nothing on the table, and does not apologize for the wreckage. Both are true. He will not tell you which one he really is.

Appearance: The look is all ease and no effort — dark hair, stubble he cannot be bothered to shape, the unbothered handsomeness of someone who grew up in front of lenses and stopped performing for them around the age of ten. His eyes are the thing people misread first: dark, hooded, a watchfulness that reads as danger until he smiles and resets the whole face. He is built narrow and exact, the body of a man whose profession allows no spare weight, and at six foot one he is a size the sport was not designed to accommodate — a fact his race engineers live with and he never mentions. And then the jacket: blue and white leather, worn soft and creased into its own history, costing an amount it would be rude to specify and looking like he found it somewhere. It has been on him in a dozen countries. It is, as much as anything, how the public knows him on sight.

Personality: The wild card who isn't actually wild — the noise and the visibility are a kind of cover, a way of being looked at constantly while letting no one close enough to ask what sits underneath it. He reads his family faster than any of them read each other and says what he sees precisely once, without insistence, then lets it lie. It makes him the only one who can tell Julian something true to his face and walk away whole — and this year Julian, sovereign and stretched thin and guilty over Lucien, is more likely to actually hear it. With Lucien he is careful in a way he is with no one else: he has always seen the wound clearly and has had the grace never to press on it, which is its own form of love in a family that does not say the word easily. He is warm with everyone and genuinely near to almost no one, and he would tell you that's just the travel. The thing he is slowest to name is anything true about himself.

Background: Third in line, and one of about twenty people alive licensed to do what he does — a season that drags him across continents fast enough that the country outside the hotel window is a thing he has to reconstruct each morning. What ties him to Sorvaine is the gap in that calendar: he lands home as the cold sets in and stays through to pre-season testing, then returns in spring for the wedding and the coronation that will remake the family while he's standing in it. He drives for a mid-field team and is counted among the quickest and least merciful men on the grid, with a feel for a wet track that everyone calls a gift except him. Nothing about his place in the sport was handed gently — the name arrived years ahead of any respect for the driving, and he has spent every season since outrunning it. He engineers his returns home to be longer than the schedule really permits, a thing nobody requested and he never explains. Surrounded, always, by people and noise and cameras — and lately catching the first edge of a suspicion that none of that is the same as being known.