Chapter 390: Reshuffling
No one knew how long had passed before the fire finally died down.
It seemed that someone had deliberately controlled the spread of the flames, so that, apart from the ballroom, most other areas hadn’t suffered serious damage. Even so, it still took a long time before the blaze was fully extinguished.
The captain of the knight order in charge of security hadn’t appeared right away, so Carle naturally took over the responsibility.
Still wearing his formal suit from the banquet, he hadn’t had time to change, he put his wife and daughter in a safe place before throwing himself into firefighting efforts.
Now he stood holding a guest list from the banquet, checking the names one by one against the survivors and the dead. His long white hair, hastily tied up in the chaos, was now stained grayish-black with soot. His face and clothes were also unkempt, making him look utterly disheveled.
“……”
He checked off each guest, crossing out those confirmed dead and circling those still unaccounted for.
When he reached Armand’s name, his pen tip paused for a moment.
Armand’s body lay right in front of him, covered with a white sheet, only half of his face left exposed for identification.
Carle looked at him and instinctively took a deep breath, as if trying to push his emotions back down. But the dust in the air made him cough twice.
Armand’s clothes, or rather the clothes on his “body”, had a hole in them. There was a clear piercing wound in his chest. But for Armand, that injury shouldn’t have been fatal. At least from the traces of medicine left behind, it was clear he had treated it himself, and it hadn’t struck his heart. In theory, it shouldn’t have killed him outright.
From what the Crown Prince had reported, “there was an assassin in the fire zone”, it seemed Armand had been wounded while protecting the prince… but again, this wasn’t a fatal injury.
This meant that something else must have happened afterward, something that left no visible wounds, yet was enough to kill him.
Over on the Second Prince’s side, he claimed that he and the King had also encountered an assassin.
The King had a cut on his arm, while the Second Prince, shielding the old King, had suffered severe injuries, burns on the left side of his face so bad they were almost disfiguring. Whether he could keep his left eye was still uncertain, and he remained in a coma even now.
Looking at it that way, the Crown Prince, who had only burned his right hand, was actually the least injured of them all.
When Carle first heard the word “assassin,” he instinctively suspected the Second Prince. But since the Second Prince had also been badly injured, he couldn’t make such accusations lightly—
Even if he thought it very likely this was a “desperate self-sacrifice” ploy.
But political intrigue aside, what he cared more about was Armand lying beneath the shroud.
When he first charged into the fire, the very first thing he did was try to find Armand. But it wasn’t until the fire was out that he saw his body collapsed by a side doorway, as if he had been dead for some time, his blood already dried.
The chest wound hadn’t killed him, but judging from the blood around his nose and mouth, it was likely that his “old illness” had flared up again. As for what that illness was, Carle still had no idea.
He had never liked to pry into other people’s private lives. Yet now, because of that, Armand had died without anyone understanding the truth.
Carle crouched beside him, looking at his closed eyes. It almost seemed like he was sleeping more peacefully than he ever did napping in his office.
Rachel and Evelia’s names were circled on the list, since he hadn’t yet found either of them, or their bodies.
Rachel’s original body had been placed in a nearby corner and had long since been reduced to ashes by the flames.
And Evelia, of course, she had been “retrieved” by the House of Nightingales.
If this fire really was part of a conspiracy within the royal family, then even if Armand’s death was full of suspicious points, no one would perform an autopsy. On royal grounds, no one could openly speak of anything that went against the royal family.
“…Sigh…”
For a moment, Carle seemed to have endless things to say. But when he realized that Armand could no longer respond, he turned all his words into a long sigh.
With a complicated expression, he pulled the last corner of the white shroud over Armand’s face.
Click.
He uncapped his pen. His fingers hesitated, but he had to accept the reality. He drew a horizontal line through the name Armand Systalia.
Only when other knights came to ask him about the progress of the survivor list did he snap out of his daze.
He wiped his face and turned to leave.
No one knew what he was thinking. Carle had always been a man of few words, but after that day, he spoke even less.
After Armand’s sacrifice, things happened exactly as people had once said, “If Armand ever meets misfortune, Carle will naturally take his place as captain of the knights.” Now, Carle was no longer the vice-captain, but the official captain of the Royal Knight Order.
However, because of the aftermath of the fire, the knights were extremely busy, and Carle was no exception. For the past few days, he hadn’t had a single good night’s sleep.
Becoming the captain was supposed to come with a grand ceremony, but because of the chaos, no such event was held.
Instead, Carle simply received the captain’s badge that Armand had often carried with him, nothing else. He didn’t even have time to order his official uniform.
The vice-captain’s position also remained unfilled. The knight order itself was in complete disarray.
Because of the fire, Armand, the main person responsible for security at the banquet, had been killed. Other knights who were supposed to cooperate with him were dismissed by the old King for negligence.
The reorganization of the knight order was basically a complete “change of blood.” Aside from Carle stepping up to become captain, almost all the faces were new. It would take time to fully get to know them.
But, before Carle could even become familiar with these new faces, he suddenly and quietly disappeared.
No one knew what he had done or what had been done to him. He left behind no message, no letter. It was as if, on an ordinary day, he had reached a crossroads and simply vanished.
After the former captain Armand’s death, the current captain Carle was also missing without a trace.
When people went to his home, they found only his wife and daughter, along with the usual household servants.
Many knew Carle was a devoted family man. If he had planned to leave, he would never have done so without arranging for his wife and daughter’s safety.
But even his family claimed they had no idea where he had gone. They said he had gone to the knight order that morning as usual, but never came back.
Yet, on the day they mentioned, Carle had actually skipped work. He never appeared at the knights’ headquarters, nor in anyone’s sight. He vanished as if into thin air.
Even the few deputies who had been considered reliable under him disappeared not long afterward.
No one knew where he went, but rumors spread that while investigating the cause of Armand’s death and the whereabouts of Evelia and Rachel, he had touched the interests of “certain people,” and that was why he and his men suddenly “disappeared.”
Now, the knight order had finally undergone a true “reshuffling of the deck.”