Run the pre-David pass on a scene. The brief is [redacted]/.claude/sk…

I'll start by reading the skill brief.

Findings

Part 1 — does this sentence make sense?

"a causeway built for one opinion at a time" — Part 1, a word doing a job it cannot do. "Opinion" has just been used figuratively of the road; reused here it means nothing literal (a causeway is built for one cart at a time), and the reader stalls on it. Replace: "along a causeway built for one cart at a time".
"at twenty past six in the evening by his status, three hours older than the plan" — Part 1, check the clock. Twelve miles at the four hours the arithmetic allows puts arrival three hours after the plan only if they left the Sluice at about twenty past eleven, which contradicts "while the morning was still cool" and a scene that has them walking most of a day. Either name a late departure or make the figure fit; simplest: "six hours older than the plan" (drover an hour, the windpump keeper and his three questions, the gates, the bridge, teaching stretches — six is what the paragraph actually spends).
"three hours older than the plan" — Part 6, plainest form. "Older than the plan" makes the hours an attribute of them rather than of the arrival. Replace: "three hours later than the arithmetic, and neither of them said so."
"She was doing sums in her head; he could see them going by." — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge, and it contradicts the next line, where she does the sums out loud. Edwin cannot see sums. Replace: "She did the sums out loud, the way she did." (canon, peri.md: "She thinks out loud. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
"got an aunt's hand flat on his shoulder" / "the aunt's hand was doing something" — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge. Neither Edwin nor Peri can know a strange woman in the street is the boy's aunt. Replace both with "a woman's hand flat on his shoulder" and "the woman's hand was doing something".
"a kitchen that had been baking since noon" — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge / a very specific number. He is smelling a kitchen from a yard; "since noon" is a figure he cannot have. Replace: "a kitchen that had been baking most of the day".
"on the strength of a letter's answer that had only said I will come" — Part 1, flat restatement: "a letter's answer" is a possessive chain that has to be unpicked (whose letter, whose answer). Replace: "on the strength of three words he had sent her: I will come."
"because a thing a whole village agrees not to say is a thing there's an agreed reason not to say" — Part 1, the flat version is empty: restated flat, this says a village that agrees has agreed. It is also his third and fourth "and" in one sentence (edwin.md 7a, the inventory pile is redacted's). Replace: "Nor do I, and we'll likely find out before we've been here a day. A whole street doesn't keep off one word by accident; somebody has given them a reason for it, and reasons get given to strangers eventually, usually with an apology attached."
"It's the best fact we've collected since the birds." — VOICE §People say what they mean: "the birds" is a callback word carrying the meaning on its own; a reader who has not read scene 29 gets nothing. Replace: "since the starlings went round that pasture."
"Nobody would say it. They'd point, but they wouldn't name it." — Part 1, tense: the thing has just happened, so the conditional is wrong; and the balanced two-half sentence is Edwin's construction, banned for her (peri.md 7b). Replace: "Nobody said it. They pointed us up the road and not one of them put a name on it."
"and that two days was not a line yet" — Part 1, check the counts / whose sentence. Scene 28 has "thirty-one" as her guess count by noon on Day 8; here "thirty-one" is her right answers, two paragraphs after a scene that used the same number differently — the reader will read it as the same tally. Change one of them (e.g. "twenty-eight right"). Separately, "not a line yet" is a verdict of Edwin's kind arriving unattributed in her mouth; either give it a source ("which was his sentence, and she used it") or make it hers as a count: "and that two days was two numbers".
"the second gate past the withy bed" / "Her gate's the second one" / "the second gate beyond them" — Part 1, dependents of an edit. The woman's second direction drops the withy bed and reads as the second gate from the church; the arrival line drops it too. Make the arrival line match the direction given: "the second gate past the withy bed stood open".

Part 2 — the gesture at meaning

"swallowed the rest of the word like a boiled sweet" — Part 2, a figure comparing two things the reader cannot hold: a boiled sweet is sucked, not swallowed; swallowing one is a choking accident, not a suppression. Replace: "and shut his mouth on the rest of it."
"which was her way of saying a thing again when she could not believe it the first time" — Part 2, the unwanted explanation of a device. The repetition does its own work; the narrator footnotes it. Cut the clause, keeping "'You don't know,' she said, flat."
"The woman finished the bucket's business with the same hands" — Part 2, say what the claim is. "The bucket's business" and "with the same hands" gesture at "her behaviour did not change" without saying it. Replace: "The woman went on rinsing the bucket at the same speed".
"and that I can feel what it's costing me to write that" — Part 2, announcing the significance: she narrates her own interior rather than reporting it, which is the noticing-before-speaking fault. Replace: "I'm noting that I no longer think it's suspicious. A month ago I'd have written the opposite and underlined it."
"which he had not taught her and could not have" — Part 2, a claim never named: why could he not have? Also "put the notebook away before the yard's light reached her" leaves the reason unstated. Replace: "and put the notebook away before they came into the light of the door, so that Mattie would not walk out to a stranger writing her down. It was not a thing he had taught her."
"Lessons," — VOICE §People say what they mean: a one-word answer the reader has to decode into her filing system. Replace: "'That goes under LESSONS,' said Peri,"
"The road had opinions the arithmetic lacked" and "the way a village looks at what the road brings in" — Part 7 / VOICE §2: two narrator generalisations against a budget of one. Keep the village one (it earns the staff beat) and plain the first: "The arithmetic did not know about the road."

Parts 4–6 — character, device, strength

"The System counts what it counts. redacted sentence: unpublished prose This is both at once, and it is the most quotable line in the scene. Replace with a bare fact: "The sheet has never once told me a field was coming up short."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace the second: "Disagree with me, and I'd start arguing with a number instead of listening to a field, and I've watched that ruin better mages than me."
"It seems I have gone somewhere." — Part 6, and the author's standing note that "I have levelled" should be "I levelled". Replace: "It seems I've gone somewhere."
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replace: "The hand belongs in the book. It's the best fact we've collected since the starlings went round that pasture."
Edwin's hospitality speech, delivered "at the woman coming out of the light toward them" — Part 4, why would this character say this here? A speech about how the host is obliged to feed you, spoken while the host walks up to you in her own yard, is a thing Edwin would not risk. Move it earlier — say it on the dry road, before the gate — and leave at the yard only: "'That's the farmer,' said Edwin. 'Mattie Ordish.'"
"Get it done well and everything after it goes better." — edwin.md 6c: proverb-shaped closer on a teaching paragraph, and it is the scene's second teaching paragraph against a budget of one. If the speech moves to the road, end it on a fact: "She'll have been cooking since my letter came."
"this is the part of the trade, Miss Millbrook" — Part 4, knowledge/relationship state: nine days in and after scenes 28–29's working intimacy, the surname address reads as a reversion to the doorstep. Suggest "Peri". (Low confidence; the main session may want the formality.)

Devices a second round would be about

The one device likeliest to draw a whole-scene comment is the street's not-naming: the boy's cut-off "r—" plus "there's a word they're all not saying" plus Edwin's "we'll likely find out" is three separate signals that the scene is withholding, and the reader already knows the word is rings from scene 28 — so the withholding buys nothing it has not already spent. To make it work, drop one of the three signals (the "r—" is the one to cut: the hand on the shoulder does the whole job) and let Peri's line be about the hand, not about the word.

The second is Edwin's sheet-refusal speech, which is currently the scene's argument, its aphorism, its contrastive pair and its teaching paragraph in one block. With findings 20–21 applied it stands as a reason given on the page; if a comment comes back at it a second time, the repair is structural — let Peri take it apart in two exchanges rather than receiving it entire — and not another rewording of the last sentence.