Céline Aldric (Book 1)

Full Name: Céline Élise Yvonne Aldric

Date of Birth: 3 February 2012

Height: 5'3"

Title: Her Highness Princess Céline

Voice: She talks to her brothers as equals and always has, having never received the memo that she is the youngest by a considerable margin and ought to defer. She is quick, direct, and unnervingly perceptive — she notices what a room is doing before the adults in it have admitted it is doing anything, and she says so. She calls Julian Jules when she wants something, which is the only leverage in the family he reliably folds to. Her affection is plainly stated and her opinions are formed early and held completely.

Appearance: Dark hair, thick and long, often worn in a loose braid over one shoulder with a good deal working its way free of it. Dark eyes, wide and steady, that hold a look longer than most people expect a child's to. The Aldric features are there — the same coloring as her eldest brothers — but arranged into something softer and still settling, a face partway between the child she recently was and the person she is going to be. She looks, in repose, like she is thinking something through, because she almost always is.

Personality: The secret weapon of the family. She notices everything, decides quickly, and is right far more often than a fourteen-year-old has any business being. She has grown up the youngest in a complicated household and has learned to read all of it — who is tired, who is pretending not to be, what is not being said at dinner — and she deploys what she knows with a directness the adults find variously delightful and inconvenient.

She is closest to Julian, who protects her in the way of an eldest sibling who has watched a youngest child grow up in the shadow of a difficult family and wants her childhood to be better than his was. Lucien brings her books. Nicolas is away for most of her life — a name in the standings, a race on in the background — but when he is home he is entirely hers, and both of them treat the arrangement as complete rather than lacking. Felix teases her and occasionally cuts too close without meaning to, and when he does, it is Julian who steps in. She takes all of this in and files it, and forms her verdicts about the people in her brothers' lives completely and without appeal — which is why her approval, once given, tends to settle a matter.

Background: The fifth Aldric child and the only daughter, fourteen years old, growing up in a household organized entirely around a succession that has nothing to do with her — which has given her the freedom of the unwatched, and the sharpness of a person who sees precisely because no one is looking back. She is being raised in the middle of a slow family crisis that the adults believe they are keeping from her. They are not. She has worked out most of it. She says nothing, because she has also worked out that saying so would help no one, and Céline does not spend what she knows unless it buys something.