Nicolas Aldric (Book 1)

Full Name: Nicolas Émile Gaston Aldric

Date of Birth: 7 April 2001

Height: 6'1"

Title: His Highness Prince Nicolas

Voice: He has his eldest brother's sharpness with none of the weight attached to it, which makes him a great deal easier to be around and considerably harder to know. He is funny on purpose and disarming on purpose, and the two are frequently the same manoeuvre. He says the true thing when it is least convenient — once, briefly, without emphasis, and then he lets it go and talks about something else. People tend not to notice they have been told something until several hours later.

Appearance: Dark hair, longer on top and swept back off his face, kept the way a man keeps it when he knows there will be cameras and has decided he does not mind. Dark eyes under heavy brows, and the same sharp Aldric jaw under stubble he does not fuss over. He dresses well and makes it look like an accident. The eye is genuine — he knows exactly what he is doing and has never once appeared to be doing it, which is a harder trick than his eldest brothers' precision and gets a fraction of the credit. Blues and reds and whites, mostly, over something dark. The constant is the leather racing jacket, blue and white across the shoulders, expensive in a way that is not immediately obvious and entirely obvious to anyone who knows what they are looking at, and worn to the point that the creases have decided where they live. The press has photographed him in it on four continents. He is rarely photographed without it.

He is built the way his job requires: the only one of the four brothers whose physique is a professional obligation rather than a private discipline. He leans on things. He has never in his life stood at attention when he could stand at an angle instead, and the European press adores him for it. He is the one most completely at ease in front of a camera, which is no accident: between the palace and the paddock, he has never known a version of his life without one pointed at him.

Personality: The wild card who is not quite wild. The paddock persona is partly performance: a way of being away from Sorvaine without being absent from it, and a way of being enormously visible while giving away nothing at all. His private life is far quieter than it appears in print.

Felix is the exception to everything. Almost three years between them and no distance at all: the brother he calls without a reason, the only person whose messages he answers from the paddock. With everyone else he is warm and slightly out of reach, and he would tell you this is simply the schedule.

He sees things quickly and says them once. He is the only brother who will put a thing plainly to Julian's face and survive it, largely because he has nothing to lose and both of them know it.

Background: Twenty-five, third in line, and one of roughly twenty people in the world doing his job. He races in Formula 1 on a calendar that runs from Bahrain to Silverstone to Suzuka with barely enough time between rounds to establish which country he is in.

He is also two inches taller than the cockpit would prefer. Everything about the car is designed around people built smaller than he is — the seat, the packaging, the weight limits, the sheer folded compression of getting in and staying there for two hours in the heat. He has never once offered this as an explanation for anything. He simply gets out of the car more tired than everyone else and does not mention it.

Everyone sees him come home in May, because the circuit comes to Sorvaine and the whole principality turns out to watch him work. Fewer people notice the rest of it. He takes the August break at home, and he is there at Christmas, and he arranges both around a calendar that does not make it easy. Nobody has ever asked him to. He simply comes back, which is its own kind of answer to the question of what the paddock is for.