The three clappers changed the room the moment Cassian laid them on the long table.
Not because they looked dramatic. They did not. Wrapped in rough cloth and marked with chalk, they could have passed for old metal from any ruined shepherd post if no one knew what they meant. That was exactly why they felt so foul once the hall understood them. Rowan had spent months turning ordinary things into openings: work slips, bath keys, laundry routes, fence repairs, handcarts, coal, bread, women moving through the house as though daily life still belonged to itself. Now even sound had joined the line.
