Lucien Aldric (Book 1)

Full Name: Lucien Alexander Édouard Aldric

Date of Birth: 29 November 1996

Height: 6'4"

Title: His Highness Prince Lucien

Voice: Precise and economical. He says the thing in the fewest words available and then stops, which people consistently mistake for coldness and which is actually just a shy man being efficient about a transaction he did not want. His sarcasm is nothing like his brother's — where Julian's is a tool, chosen and aimed, Lucien's is simply what happens when a man who is thinking something precise and unflattering runs out of patience for the polite version. It is never cruel. It is only accurate, which is frequently worse.

Appearance: The tallest of the four brothers, by multiple inches he has never found a use for. Dark hair, worn long and left to do as it likes — he has the same wave his eldest brother has and rather less interest in it. A dark beard, kept close. He is meticulous about it, in the way of a man who is meticulous about everything he has actually decided to care about. He dresses in white, almost invariably: a good shirt, sleeves turned back to the elbow, collar open, nothing about it announcing itself. 

His glasses are for reading and close work and they come off the moment he leaves the desk — on for his own rooms, his own hours, his own work; off for everything the family needs of him. In most pictures taken of him they are somewhere in frame, folded on whatever he was in the middle of.

He looks straight back at the camera, which surprises people who have been told he is shy. He is. It is simply that a lens asks nothing of him — no conversation, no small talk, no reason to be charming. Of all the things the role demands, being photographed is the one he finds easiest.

Personality: Genuinely shy, which is not the same as reserved and is a distinction the world declines to make for him. He is warmest with the youngest two, who generate an ease he finds both appealing and faintly exhausting, and gentlest with Céline — he is the brother who brings her books. With Julian there is a coolness that neither of them has ever named aloud and both of them maintain with professional consistency in public. They were very close as children. Nobody in the family says this in front of them.

He is not difficult. He is elsewhere, and would very much like to be left there.

Background: Twenty-nine years old, second in line, and an academic first by inclination and second by any measure the palace recognizes. His doctorate is in medieval European history — specifically the economic structures of small sovereign states, which is either irony or inevitability depending on your view of the family. He publishes. He is taken seriously by people who do not care what his family name is, which is the only professional respect he has ever fully trusted.

The rest of the time he stands where he is told to stand. He appears at formal family events, manages the public role with pained efficiency, and disappears back to his books the moment the cameras have what they came for. He has spent his adult life being told what a privilege it is to be the spare. He has never once been asked whether he wanted it.