Isabelle Vauclaire (Book 1)

Full Name: Isabelle Vauclaire

Date of birth: 15 September 1996

Height: 5'7"

Appearance: Dark hair, arranged with a simplicity that takes considerable work and shows none of it. She is straightforwardly beautiful, and carries it the way she carries everything else — without apparent thought, as a fact about herself she settled long ago and no longer notices. She occupies a room with complete ease, not as a statement but as a natural condition, the bearing of a woman who has never once had to wonder whether she belongs where she is standing. In a wine-red gown at a state reception she curtsies to the Crown Prince without a trace of self-consciousness, the gesture of someone who has been doing it since childhood.

Voice: Measured and elegant, with a dry precision underneath the courtesy. She says exactly what she means and no more, and the economy is its own kind of authority. She and Julian, one suspects, would have made rather better friends than anything the two families had in mind.

The woman she is: Intelligent, politically astute, and genuinely fond of Sorvaine — entirely aware of what the expected marriage would mean and entirely capable of carrying it. She and Julian have known each other their whole adult lives, across the same state occasions and official rooms, with the ease of long familiarity. She has inhabited the arrangement, and the expectations that come with it, with a grace that costs her more than she shows.

She is a woman in a complicated position, carrying it with poise and without complaint, and she holds her own dignity as something she decided on for her own reasons — which is harder than it looks and rarer than it should be.