Working dir [redacted]. Read ALL 24 scene files in draft/book-01/scen…

I'll read the files.

Report: magic-theory.md vs. the 24 scenes

I read all 24 scene files and notes/canon/world/magic-theory.md in full. Findings below, ordered by severity.

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BREAKS

1. The parish five are listed wrong.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (scenes/07-can-you-actually-fight.md): "There are four, and they come in an order, and compost comes first, once you've built a heap without it." He did not look up from Widow Sepp's wrist. "A charm for what's in store. A blessing for a sick beast. Frost-sense. Water-finding."
• Why: the page's five are compost / keeping charm / redacted / frost-sense / water-finding. The table invents "walk", splits "night" and "beast" out of the single redacted, and drops frost-sense and water-finding entirely — the two the rest of the file elsewhere (§2) correctly names.
• Fix: change the Addressed cell to heap, store, beast, frost, water.

2. "Blessing" means two incompatible things, and the page's meaning is the farmer's.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (07): *"And the blessing makes the beast well?" / "It buys you the night," said Mrs Tansy... redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• Why: on the page a blessing is one of the five, cast by farmwives, taught by Edwin's teachers, costs mana like anything else, and demonstrably does something. §9's "a blessing does nothing" is stated unrestrictedly and collides head-on.
• Fix: in §9, open with the disambiguation — "A priest's blessing (not the parish's redacted, which is a hold and is one of the five) is an asking-after..." — and repeat the carve-out in the §5 table row.

3. §6 says the class does Peri's wording; the page makes wording the whole of her craft (and §7 agrees with the page).

• magic-theory §6: *"[Seal of the Loom] and [redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• Page (02-a-war-horse-on-a-milk-cart.md): "Two things. I spent a long time on the wording." She was proud of the wording and did not hide it. And (13-when-did-you-last-leave.md): "I'm getting better at the wording. That's the hard part."
• Why: wording is Peri's single most repeated characteristic and the axis of her arc; §6 removes it from her. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose

4. Ground that has stopped doing business does answer the instruments — five of six of them.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose ground that has stopped doing business"*).

• Page (18-nought-in-every-kind.md): "the block is healthy by every measure that does not require it to be alive" — the salts assay "came back sweet", water-and-air "came back open-textured and easy", blight "found none of them", taint "Clean.", exhaustion "The block was rich." Only the quickening assay returns "nought, across every kind at once".
• Why: the whole horror of scene 18 is that the instruments work perfectly and report health; the theory says they cannot be used at all, which would defuse the scene.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose

5. The compost cantrip is a telling in theory and an asking on the page, and the page's failure mode is anger, not hand shape.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose a stiff wrist makes a heap go hot and sour in a night."* §12: "you 'tell' a heap."

• Page (04-four-minutes.md): "A heap is alive, and the cantrip asks it to hurry, and if you ask angrily it hears the anger and not the asking, and you get a heap that has gone hot and sour in one night and has to be pulled apart. I have seen it done by a good caster who had had a letter that morning. Calm hands."
• Why: two problems. (a) Nobody on the page ever "tells" a heap; Edwin explicitly calls the paradigm tell-working an asking. (b) The theory attributes the hot-and-sour failure to a stiff wrist; the page attributes it to the caster's state of mind, and a stiff wrist on the page is Widow Sepp's arthritis, not a miscasting. The theory has no channel at all for the caster's mood, though the page makes it load-bearing.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose

6. "Everything held goes back to what it was doing when you let go" — the front does not.

• magic-theory §2: "Everything held goes back to what it was doing when you let go; nothing is made permanent by holding."
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• Why: he lets go and the front stays put overnight, ~18 hours, and delivers on schedule — the opposite of reverting.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose You do not get permanence, you get a new starting place."*

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STRAINS

7. Weather is hold-only in theory; the page also tells it.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (09): "watched his rain do what it had been told"; (01-pellings-half-past-twelve-soft.md): "bring what was left over the Pellings at half past twelve as a warm rain with small drops in it."
• Why: choosing drop size and warmth is shaping, not merely walking a thing where it stood.
• Fix: §5 weather verb → hold; small tells inside the hold, with one line in §2 noting a held thing can be told small things about how it does what it is already doing.

8. Fate magic is not read as weather on the page.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (02): "something worn close over the whole person, moving slowly, the way light moves on still water... On this girl it hung in loops. Great slack cabled loops of it... the way a ship's hawser might be draped on a child." (03): "All that slack silver cabling."
• Why: the quoted phrase does not occur anywhere in the scenes; the page's image is rope and hawser, not weather. Only "silver" and "slow" survive.
• Fix: replace the quotation with the page's actual image, or mark it as a magic.md/plans citation rather than a page citation. If the weather reading is wanted, it must be written into a scene first.

9. Constant unconscious soil-listening is free on the page; theory says everything costs mana.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (17-lid-up-the-whole-way.md): "the one he used on skies and on the vale's fields daily, so habitual by now that he did it walking past a garden without deciding to" — versus, in the same sequence, "eight castings in an hour, which would have emptied a second-year to the floor, and he felt it as a dent."
• Why: a working billed at every use cannot also be done involuntarily all day at no noticed cost.
• Fix: add to §2 Asking — listening is the cheapest asking there is, below the threshold a body notices; a lifetime's practitioner does it as a sense and pays for it the way you pay for looking.

10. The "thirty days" of the Seal has no counterpart on the page and reads against the terms.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• Page (03-until-fulfilled.md): "> [Terms: until fulfilled.]"; (13): "You have a claim on my future and we'll all learn its terms together."
• Why: as written the sentence reads as a thirty-day duration sitting next to "until fulfilled"; both characters treat the binding as open-ended. If it is the cooldown, the sentence does not say so.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose

11. [redacted] returning nothing is not accounted for.
    redacted sentence: unpublished prose It never deflects and never explains."*

• Page (02): "Then who am I to fight. Nothing at all." (05): "It showed her nothing."
• Why: this null is the most load-bearing Weave result in the book, and the theory's account of answering has no slot for a blank.
• Fix: add — a question with no answer in the world gets no image; a blank is a true answer and the commonest one people misread as a failed wording.

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NIT

redacted sentence: unpublished prose By the time I met them I'd muddled which answer went with what."* Fix: swap in the page's reason, or keep both and mark the contamination clause as unestablished.

13. §1 "emptying costs a day" vs page (06) "a working that size takes what you have and gives it back over days." Fix: "costs days, not a day."

14. §2's "the sixth revealing's 'roll-call' word" — the sixth is on the page (18) as "the quickening assay... it counted the living" and "the census of a handful of ground"; "roll-call" appears nowhere. Fix: use "census".

15. §2/§5 give the keeping charm a "push" half ("a hold on a store"). The page (07) gives only a reading: "It reads a thing's year off it... and gives it back a week or a season, depending on how it was picked and packed, and tells you the new date." Not contradicted, but the push half is unestablished; flag it as Working rather than implied-on-page.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Two senses of "cost" in one section. Fix: "the destiny's weight falls on the bound person and nobody else (the casting's mana is Peri's, and is a separate matter)."

17. Page (17) establishes soil-listening as "the sense that sits behind the mage-sight" — one faculty stack. §2 lists soil-listening and mage-sight as unrelated askings. Fix: one clause in §2 noting they are the same sense at different ranges.

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Quotation audit

Verified present in the scenes, in the sense claimed:

• "the front did not move because he pushed it; it moved because he had it" — 06 ✓ (exact)
• "There is no better way to say it, and he had stopped looking for one in his first century." — 06 ✓ (exact)
• "the working was not aimed at him until it had already happened" — 03 ✓ (exact)
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• "a poor thin nothing" (salt pan, burnt ground) — 17 ✓ (exact, and the salt-pan/burnt-ground context is right)
• "needed isn't the same as important" — 13 ✓ ("Needed isn't the same as important.")
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• "two-mage days and black winters" (staff) — 23 ✓ (exact)
• capacity "grows only by being emptied" / thirty-year-old capacity — 02 ✓ ("A pool grows by being emptied... most mages' capacity sits where it was at thirty")
• "white, sweating, staggering" as the ability's mana cost — 03 ✓ (in substance)
• Sorrel breaking a hail front — 10 ✓ ("the hail Sorrel had broken herself")
• [redacted redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• mage-sight reads what is worn — 02 ✓ ("She was wearing fate magic")
• [Destiny: PENDING] / [Terms: until fulfilled.] — 03, 05 ✓ (exact)

Could NOT find anywhere in the 24 scenes:
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

• "a murmur of commerce" (§3) — nearest is 17: "a murmur you learned in your first year at Wystow" and "keeping books with each other in the dark". The phrase itself is not on the page.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• "a second set of weather ... like slow silver" (§7) — see finding 8
• "nothing in it to ask" (blessing-sense, §9) — Ferrin does not appear in any of the 24 scenes; the only priest is offstage in the Fenholt letter (14): "The priest came and looked and now he will not walk that field and will not say why not."
• "ninety and sixty years a priest" (§7)
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• "a soft wrist" as a quoted phrase (§10) — the page has "the wrists all soft" (10) and "every wrist soft" (17), which support the point; the stiff-wrist failure claim does not (finding 5).
• "in longer words" (§10)
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Checked and found clean (no conflict):

• Empty vs grey: no scene uses "grey" as a mana state (only grey book / grey head / grey slant / grey-gold). 06 has "He was emptied." The distinction is unestablished on the page but nothing contradicts it.
• The compost cantrip as unit: no scene prices anything in cantrips. 18 gives "eight castings in an hour, which would have emptied a second-year to the floor, and he felt it as a dent" — compatible, not confirming.
• Feeding mana / healing at the parish: no healing occurs in any scene; no healer appears; Mrs Hobbet's shoulder and Widow Sepp's wrist go untreated. §8 and §14.6 are consistent with the page by absence.
  redacted sentence: unpublished prose
• Stone and the dead: never tested on the page; no conflict.