Chapter 745
Hroth raised one shoulder faintly. “I know because I overheard some of the older guards talking about him. Not recently. A while ago. The sort of half-serious talk men fall into when they’ve been standing around too long and think nobody important is listening.” His mouth twitched without humor. “They said the old man had become unusually interested in expanding the family’s holdings in medicine-related businesses during the last stretch of his life. Apparently he was convinced one specific family of apothecaries was about to become much more important than people realized.”
Ludger took a step closer, just enough to make it clear this mattered.
“What do you know about those apothecaries?”
Hroth shook his head once.
“Not much,” he admitted. “I never had a reason to look into them. I only remember the name coming up in passing, and even that I’m not fully certain of. But there was one thing I did hear.”
He paused for a moment, searching through the old fragments.
“Their rivals died around twenty years ago. A fire.”
Ludger’s face remained still, but his focus deepened immediately. Hroth continued in more detail now, his voice lower, steadier.
“It was way before my current post, and long before I had any reason to pay attention to any apothecary circles. But even then, some stories hang around because they’re too suspicious.” He looked at Ludger. “One family burns. The other survives. Then the surviving family suddenly inherits a flood of clients, more influence, and a much stronger position in the market.”
He glanced down toward the streets, thinking.
“From what little I remember, the dead family had a decent name. Not one of the great noble-backed houses, but established. Respected enough that losing them opened a clean space in the trade. After the fire, the other apothecary family stepped into that gap. Gradually at first, then faster. More contracts. Better clientele. Nobles who would have split their purchases before started relying more heavily on them instead.”
Ludger said nothing, letting him continue. Hroth’s brows drew together slightly.
“At the time, it was probably treated as one of those ugly but ordinary tragedies. Buildings burn. People die. Markets shift. The living fill the void left behind.” He let the words settle for a second. “But hearing what you said just now…” He frowned. “A noble house head preparing to pour serious money into that same family before suddenly falling sick does not sound as harmless as it did before.”
Ludger’s gaze hardened. An apothecary family. A dead rival around twenty years ago. A sudden rise in influence after a fire. And now a noble house head showing unusual interest in them shortly before his own collapse.
It could still be a coincidence. But coincidences were starting to pile up in a way he had long since learned not to trust. Hroth noticed the shift in Ludger’s face and gave a faint, humorless exhale.
“That’s all I know for certain,” he said. “Or close enough to certain.” Then his eyes narrowed slightly. “But if you’re asking me what I think…”
He looked back out over the capital, toward the dark shape of noble estates and the wealth buried behind their walls.
“I think you may have found a better place to dig than old funeral records.”
Ludger fell silent for a few seconds, letting the pieces settle into place without forcing them too quickly. Then he spoke, his voice low and even.
“It seems those two families were about to do something that would have caused a great deal of noise.” Hroth glanced at him, but Ludger kept his eyes on the city below.
“Not a minor transaction. Not a simple investment.” His gaze narrowed slightly. “Something big enough to matter. Big enough that someone would rather remove them than let it happen.”
He turned one page over in his mind, then another.
“The rival apothecaries burned twenty years ago and the other family gained influence from their fall. Now, years later, the previous head of your current employer’s family was apparently preparing to invest heavily in that same apothecary line before he suddenly got sick and died.” Ludger’s expression hardened. “That does not sound random.”
Hroth said nothing. Ludger continued, his tone turning colder as the logic tightened.
“Perhaps those families were both eliminated because of that.” He looked at Hroth directly now. “And the head of the noble house was killed in a method that would not leave room for real investigation. No blade. No poison anyone could point at. No dramatic murder to provoke the wrong questions.” His eyes sharpened. “Just an illness. Slow decline. Natural enough to bury with dignity and silence.”
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The words hung between them. Hroth did not argue. That alone was telling. Ludger took another step closer, the wind shifting faintly around his coat.
“What do you know about those apothecaries?”
Hroth frowned and gave a small shake of his head.
“Nothing useful,” he said. “Not directly. I never dealt with them, never guarded them, never had cause to look into their accounts or their movements.” He paused, then added, “Only rumors.”
Ludger waited. Hroth folded his arms again, thinking.
“I heard that the first family, the one that died in the fire, had a son who escaped.”
Ludger’s face remained calm, but his attention sharpened instantly. Hroth noticed and continued.
“Apparently he wasn’t there that night. Or maybe he got out before the worst of it. The details change depending on who tells the story.” His mouth twisted faintly. “But the core of it stays the same. There was a son. He survived because he had already become an adventurer and was away from home.”
Ludger blinked. Once. Then again. And again. For the first time since Hroth had arrived, his composure showed the smallest fracture. He had heard that story before.
Not the exact names. Not the setting. But the shape of it. The rhythm of it. A family destroyed. Fire. A surviving son who was absent because he had gone out into the world as an adventurer.
His mother had told him that story. About his father’s family. About Arslan. The realization hit with enough force that, for a moment, the city around him seemed to go oddly distant.
Ludger’s gaze unfocused just slightly, not from confusion, but from the speed at which memory and logic began slamming into each other.
Arslan’s story. A family burned. A son who survived because he had not been there. A past that had always sat in the background as something tragic and old and finished. Except now it no longer felt old. And it no longer felt finished either. Hroth’s eyes narrowed as he noticed the shift.
“What?”
Ludger did not answer immediately.
His mind was already moving ahead, tearing through every version of the story he had been told, every missing detail, every name he had never thought to question because Arslan himself was not the sort of man who lingered on old grief unless forced.
When Ludger finally spoke, his voice was flatter than before.
“I know that story.”
Hroth went still. Ludger looked at him, and there was something sharper in his eyes now. Something colder. More personal.
“My mother told me about a family that died in a fire.” He paused. “My father’s family.”
That left Hroth silent. Ludger turned his gaze back toward the capital, but now he wasn’t looking at roofs or lanterns or patrol routes. He was looking at the shape of a possibility he had not expected to find tonight.
If those rumors were true… If that apothecary family… If that fire… Then this investigation had just stopped being a distant capital problem. It had reached straight into his own blood.
Hroth stared at him for a moment longer before letting out a low breath.
“Well,” he said, his tone dry again, though the weight beneath it remained, “it looks like you have even more reason to continue this investigation now.”
Ludger said nothing. Hroth looked back over the city, his eyes narrowing slightly as he thought through the scale of what they were discussing.
“But finding clues about something that happened four years ago is already difficult,” he continued. “Finding clues about something that happened almost twenty years ago…” He let out a humorless huff. “That will definitely be a challenge.”
His arms folded tighter across his chest.
“And if this is what it looks like,” he said, voice quieter now, “then whoever was involved made sure to erase every sort of evidence they could. Records disappear. Witnesses die, forget, or get bought. Old servants get replaced. Fires destroy more than bodies. After that much time, most people stop asking questions even if they ever had them to begin with.”
Ludger gave a small nod. That much was obvious.
If the fire from twenty years ago and the sicknesses from recent years were truly connected, then this was not the work of some sloppy murderer or desperate heir acting on impulse. It was something patient. Careful. The kind of thing that buried its own tracks as a matter of habit. The kind of thing that survived precisely because it made certainty impossible.
But that did not matter. Not anymore.
Ludger’s eyes remained fixed on the dark sprawl of the capital, his expression calm in the way it only became when his thoughts had already crossed some internal line and found no intention of turning back.
He could have stepped away while this was still only suspicious.
He could have treated it like another capital rot nest, worth noting, worth watching, but not worth sinking too deeply into while Lionsguard still had a dozen other problems clawing at its walls.
That option was gone now. This was no longer some distant mess involving strange nobles, buried trees, and convenient illnesses. Now it touched his father. Now it touched the past his family had carried in silence. Now it was his.
Ludger nodded once more, slower this time.
“Still,” he said, voice even and cold, “I won’t back down that easily anymore.”
Hroth said nothing.
Ludger’s gaze hardened.
“Not now.”
Because now he was all in.
All the way into this filthy, tangled situation of dead nobles, old fires, buried diseases, and erased truths. Whatever lay at the center of it, whether it was a family, a trade network, an old conspiracy, or something even uglier, he would drag it into the light piece by piece if he had to tear half the trail out of stone with his own hands.
And if someone had truly believed twenty years was enough time to bury the truth forever, then they had made a mistake. A very expensive one.