You are the editing subagent for the third draft of Book 1 of the nov…

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2026-08-29

User:

You are the editing subagent for the third draft of Book 1 of the novel at redacted. Read CLAUDE.md first and obey it. Do not read notes/sealed/.

Your brief is the skill at .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md — read it in full and follow it exactly. Your material: draft/book-01/scenes/22-the-price-of-a-mule.md, read after scenes 01–21 in the same directory (they bind what is on the page — including scene 15's Weave report and scene 20, where Peri watched him soften an oilskin and was told what a week costs). redacted sentence: unpublished prose Also chapters/006-the-handover.md — the groundwork this restages, which the author rates good and which drew no comments from him on this passage.

Report findings only, per the skill's "How to report": quote, the Part and bullet failed, why in the skill's terms, and a concrete replacement or "cut". Then the two closing lines on any device a second round would be about. Do not edit. Do not commit. Your final message is the report.

I'll start by reading the required context.

28 tool calls

🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md

✅ 319 lines, 20190 chars

🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/22-the-price-of-a-mule.md

✅ 38 lines, 3544 chars

🔧 Bash: cat CLAUDE.md >/dev/null; ls draft/book-01/scenes/ && wc -w draft/book-01/scenes/*.md

✅ 45 lines, 1792 chars

🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/01*.md draft/book-01/scenes/02*.md draft/book-01/scenes/03*.md d…

✅ 18 lines, 1947 chars

🔧 Read redacted: private

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🔧 Bash: cat draft/book-01/scenes/1[2-9]*.md draft/book-01/scenes/2[01]*.md

✅ 26 lines, 1941 chars

🔧 Read redacted: private

✅ 437 lines, 51318 chars

🔧 Bash: cat notes/canon/characters/peri.md

✅ 43 lines, 2181 chars

🔧 Read redacted: private

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🔧 Read redacted: private

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🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose

✅ 4 lines, 134 chars — 932 notes/canon/characters/edwin.md / 624 notes/canon/characters/minor.md / 157 chapters/006-the-handover.md

🔧 Read chapters/006-the-handover.md

✅ 158 lines, 17728 chars

🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/edwin.md

✅ 933 lines, 62246 chars

🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/minor.md

✅ 625 lines, 39820 chars

Findings — draft/book-01/scenes/22-the-price-of-a-mule.md

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose Everyone says."**
    Part 1, check the dependents of every edit (and Part 4, knowledge states). This passage is inherited from ch. 006, where nothing preceded it. Scene 20 now does: Peri sat in his kitchen four days ago and watched him work a forty-year-old oilskin soft with his thumbs, was told "if a man went east this week", and was told to her face what a week here costs against a week there. She does not need the village, and she cannot be surprised. As written she is both less observant and more deferential than the scene before her.
    Replacement: cut "gone through surprise into" — "She had gone solemn, and lit up, and she said, quietly:" — and build her opening on what she actually saw: "You hung the oilskin where it'd be in the way," she said. "It's been there since Tuesday."

**2. "I have a list," she said. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, check every fact inside the scene. In scene 20 he dictated her provisioning list — boots, stockings, bread, not cheese, a knife, twine — and she wrote twine down and underlined it and said "I'll get twine." The list she is holding is four days old and his. Claiming spring provenance for it reads as a line that has not noticed the previous scene.
Replacement: "I've got your list," she said. "And my own, since the spring."

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It's less than you think."**
    Part 5, redundancy — a fact already delivered is not delivered again. The whole of scene 20 is this instruction, delivered at length, to a girl taking dictation. Repeating the headline two days later makes him a man who forgets what he has told people, and the mileage also quietly overrides the eighteen she settled on with him.
    Replacement: cut both sentences, or make the line acknowledge the earlier one: "Nothing that isn't on the list. Not the sword's business, mind, that's yours."

**4. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
Part 1, check every fact inside the scene, twice over. The winch parts are the smith's business and have been on the page as the smith's twice (scene 11: "the parts were on order through the smith"; scene 13: "he had meant to look in at the smith's on the way past, about the winch parts"). Half the room is listening, and half the room is where that news came from — this is a cover story the taproom can falsify before closing. Secondly, ch. 006's next sentence, "It was not.", has been cut, so the deception is now unmarked and the paragraph reads as though the second letter really is stables business; the explanation stops halfway. And Part 4: canon has him refusing to manage people with information because "it costs too much later" — inventing a decoy about a lord's letter, in the room, six hours before he walks out of the village in public, is that rule broken for no gain.
Replacement: cut the clause and let the room have it straight — "Edwin told him there would be two letters in the morning, not one, and did not say who the second was to. Half the room was listening."

5. "there would be two letters in the morning, not one"
Part 1, check the clock. Sorrel promised this rider a letter in the morning at the end of scene 19, and scene 20 has Edwin pushing it — "The Wystow letter can go tomorrow either way." The morning came and went. The line corrects the count and not the day, and for a man whose one broken date is a canon fact, the slip wants a word.
redacted sentence: unpublished prose

  1. redacted sentence: unpublished prose
    Part 1, check every count. At this point in the scene she has been told of exactly one letter — "a field for a farmer who wrote to me." The trial-fields results are not mentioned until his next speech. She has the box and the rider, not letters.
    Replacement: "the Weave and your farmer agree now".

7. "I won't say I told you. I'm not saying it to have been right."
Part 7, flag any reused line that a ruling has overtaken. Ch. 006 ran this as "I won't say I told you. redacted sentence: unpublished prose This scene — her vindication, delivered to the man she bound — has none. She is left speaking in finished sentences at the one moment the ruled direction wants her unfinished.
Replacement: restore "That's not — I'm not saying it to have been right," and put the second in the mule speech: "and I'd have had to — I priced a mule this week."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Under the ruled Peri direction that is the clerk arc in miniature: she asks the scene's real question and lets it drop.

To make it work, the question has to be pursued in her own grammar rather than admired by the narration — she comes back at it once with a tally when he changes the subject ("That's twice I've asked what we do with two"), and he either answers it badly or refuses on the page; failing that, cut the question and let the mule speech carry the whole of her, since the mule is the one place she pays for being right instead of being credited for it.