A younger child of the duc and duchesse de Trevalion, Hugo was born in the autumn of 1291 and enjoyed a boyhood perfectly ordinary and natural to his station.
He moved up one in the line of succession with the death of his elder brother when he was five years old; however, with his elder sister Reina as heiress he was still very much the spare, his education destined to culminate in a career in the Royal Navy. He acquitted himself well enough in the shared dancing lessons wherein Reina shone more brightly; he had no ear for languages, but was delighted to make the acquaintance of literature, the more adventurous the better; his passions were for mathematics and astronomy, the latter leading to many a surreptitious nocturnal stargazing expedition when he ought to have been asleep in bed.
He always knew he'd go to sea when he was of an age for it. The change from privileged ducal scion to lowly midshipman on one of the d'Angeline navy's mightiest oceangoing vessels, when he was just fourteen, was nonetheless a shock. It was sink or swim, and Hugo swam.
That first cruise took him all the way to the New World and back again. He returned to d'Angeline waters two years later as Lt. Lord Hugo de Trevalion, worldlier than he could have imagined before and yet not quite so worldly as he'd like, with his head full of foreign skies and foreign stars and the problems of navigating across such phenomenal distances.
Since then he has served in ever more responsible positions on smaller ships, patrolling Eisandine shores or escorting trade convoys around the Middle Sea, and in what free time his duties allow he has been wrestling with the longitude problem. It may seem a crackpot theory to people who don't know what he knows and haven't seen what he's seen — and who don't share the uncanny sense of direction common to scions of Azza — but he believes that with truly accurate charts of the moon and the stars he might someday be able to solve it…
From post to post he is dogged by rumours that he owes his rapid ascent in rank — not to mention that prestigious first cruise, so much more exciting than milk runs along the coast — more to the name of Trevalion, than to any of his personal qualities and accomplishments. Usually when a crew gets to know him they see that he's capable of pulling his weight. Still, he's privately sensitive on this point, and perhaps that's why he's so taciturn on board and courtly on shore, cultivating an air of being older and more experienced than he truly is.
Of course the other goal, besides solving the mathematical problem that would revolutionise sea travel forevermore, is to get his own ship: he's absurdly young for an independent command, but wouldn't it be nice if the nepotism worked in his favour sometimes, instead of just muddying his reputation and requiring him to prove himself over and over again—? It isn't as though he's not a capable, conscientious young officer, advanced for his years, intelligent and as well-read as one can be when one can hardly take a library to sea. He has the right surname, the right connections, and a secure matrimonial future arranged for him in his infancy; he keeps his personal finances in immaculate order, pays his respects where they are due, and invariably earns the respect of his commanding officers by being a sound and steady man.
Right now he's assigned to the Swallow, a ship in refit in Marsilikos. The idea is that he can use his time on shore to frequent Ducal Court and Night Court alike, and refresh his coat of polish after so much time at sea — and he's got a betrothed to meet, too…
