You are doing a canon consistency check on two draft scenes for an on…

2026-08-30

User:

You are doing a canon consistency check on two draft scenes for an ongoing novel project (autoroad). Working directory: redacted

Read these files in full:

• notes/canon/README.md
• notes/canon/characters/ferrin.md
• notes/canon/characters/mattie-ordish.md
• notes/canon/characters/minor.md
• notes/canon/characters/peri.md
• notes/canon/characters/edwin.md
• notes/canon/world/silent-soil.md
• notes/canon/world/timeline.md
• notes/canon/deferred-questions.md unpublished
• draft/book-01/SCENES.md (this contains an act-two binding list of rules the scenes must follow)

Also read scenes 25-31 and 34-36 in draft/book-01/scenes/ (glob draft/book-01/scenes/2[5-9]-.md draft/book-01/scenes/3[0-1]-.md draft/book-01/scenes/3[4-6]-*.md) for continuity context. These are NOT under review — just context.

Do NOT read anything under notes/sealed/.

The two scenes under review are:

• draft/book-01/scenes/32-nobodys-going-to-laugh.md
• draft/book-01/scenes/33-a-man-in-a-robe.md

Here is their full text so you don't need to re-read them (but you may re-read to double check quotes):

===SCENE 32===

32 — Nobody's going to laugh

The neighbours came at half past eight, and Mattie had known they would, because she had put the good cups out before the knocking started.

They did not come as a delegation. Nobody had agreed anything. A man called Sennet came first, whose land ran along the north side of the top field, a heavy quiet man with his hat in his hand who said he had seen the light and wondered if the mage had got in safe. redacted sentence: unpublished prose Then four more, in ones and twos, each with a reason that was not the reason. The alehouse keeper came last, and did not give a reason, because everybody in the room knew that he had come on behalf of the street and would report back to it. Mattie's kitchen had been built for a family. Nine people came into it, and Tess gave up her chair and went and sat on the stairs.

Edwin understood inside a minute what they had come for, and then spent two minutes giving them the wrong thing.

What they wanted was to be told. redacted sentence: unpublished prose That is what people want from an expert, and it is a reasonable thing to want, and he could not give it to them, because he did not have it. So he did what he had done at four hundred parish meetings and told them the truth in order. He had seen a piece of the same trouble in a box, from a place fifty miles off. redacted sentence: unpublished prose He could test the ground in six ways and would do so in the morning, and by noon tomorrow he would know some things he did not know tonight, and he would tell them what those were.

He watched it land, and it landed badly. They had already heard their own priest say he did not know. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

The alehouse keeper waited until the room had gone quiet and then said the thing he had come to say.

"I'll tell you how it is from where I stand," he said. "The corn factor's man came through in Cornmonth and knocked a shilling and threepence off the price of Fenholt barley. Not hers. All of it. Every farm in this parish, whether it's got a ring in it or not, because the factor buys the parish's barley as one lot and he'd heard the word rings. Nobody in this room has said that word in my taproom for a month, because every time it's said out loud it costs us money. redacted sentence: unpublished prose I'm not saying you shouldn't have come. I'm saying you'll understand if we're not all pleased to see you."

"I do understand it," said Edwin, and heard himself go on, and did not stop, because it was true and they would have to hear it from somebody. "But a ring that is wider every time it is measured is not a thing I can be quiet about for you. It has been getting wider since Seedmonth. If it goes on getting wider, then the next question is not whether the factor hears of it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted or comes under it into your ground, Mr Sennet, and I would rather that question got asked while it is still a question."

The kitchen went very quiet. He had made it quiet, and he knew it, and he had no idea how to make it anything else.

Then Peri said, "May I ask something?"

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Nine people turned and looked at her, and saw what they had not been looking at: a girl of eighteen with a sword propped against the wall by the door.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose "I wanted to know who else has been in it. Not near it. In it."

Nobody answered straight away. People looked at one another to see who would.

"I have," said Sennet, at last. "In Plowmonth, before any of this. I walked across it to look at her drains, because they run into mine."

"And since?"

"There's been no call to."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Her mother said her name, sharply, the way you say a child's name when it is standing on a wall.

"I went in Weedmonth," said Tess. She had gone scarlet and she kept going. "After the hay was cut. Everybody was talking as if it was a thing you couldn't go near, and nobody had gone near it, so I went, to find out. I walked to the middle ring and stood in the middle of it and counted to a hundred. Nothing happened. It's a field. The grass is good. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose

"Thank you," said Peri, and she meant it, and everybody could hear that she meant it. redacted sentence: unpublished prose It's the only thing we've heard about the field from somebody who has stood in it."

Edwin thought that it was not hers to say, in another woman's kitchen, about that woman's daughter, who had just confessed to something her mother had plainly not known. Then he thought that it was true, and that nobody else in the room had been going to say it, and that what he had been about to say himself was something about a hundred-count being a small sample, which would have been correct and would have made everything worse.

The room, which had closed up like a fist when he spoke, opened a little.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose She did not do anything clever. redacted sentence: unpublished prose She asked Sennet where his sheep had grazed in Milkmonth and where they were now, and he told her, field by field, and she wrote that down too. redacted sentence: unpublished prose

She did not once tell any of them that it would be all right. Edwin noticed that she did not, and thought that he would not have managed it.

At the end, when people were getting up, she stood up too and said to the room, in a plain voice, "I believe all of you. Every one of you has told me something true tonight, and I've written it down, and nobody is going to laugh at anybody for it in front of me."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Not because it was not true. Because nobody in that kitchen had asked him to believe them. redacted sentence: unpublished prose So would she. The difference was that she had not been asked to know anything, and had promised only what she could keep.
===END SCENE 32===

===SCENE 33===

33 — A man in a robe

The priest was waiting for them in the lane when the neighbours had gone, and he had been waiting some time, because the glass of his lantern had fogged at the top.

He was a spare man of about sixty in plain clothes, standing on the far side of the gate and not coming through it. Mattie saw him from the door and went back into the kitchen without a word, and Edwin understood that whatever was between those two had been said already and did not want saying again in front of strangers.

"You're the mage."

"Edwin Moss."

"Ferrin. redacted sentence: unpublished prose "I'll say what I've come to say and then you can ask me what you like. redacted sentence: unpublished prose I want to be plain that it isn't for keeping anything back from you. I've tried to find words for it that would be true, and I haven't got any, and I'll not give you the other kind. A priest who tells you something he doesn't know is worse than no priest."

"Have you told her that?" said Edwin. "In those words?"

Ferrin changed the lantern to his other hand.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose When I walked it. What I did. What the ground was like under my boot. I'll stand here till midnight for that."

"When did you walk it?"

"The twelfth of Seedmonth. I bless every field in the parish in the spring, out of the book, the same words for all of them. There were six that morning, and hers was the fourth."

"How do you walk them?"

"In at the gate, across on the diagonal to the far corner, and back the same way, saying the words. It's what my predecessor did and it's what I do."

"And the ground under your boot?"

"Firm. Dry for Seedmonth. The grass was good, everywhere I put my foot." He stopped.

"That's the ground," said Edwin. "I'd have asked about the ground next, and you've saved me the trouble. I'm asking about you. What was it like, standing in it?"

"I know what you're asking." The lantern did not move. "I've said I've no true words for it. I have tried. I've stood in that lane on more nights than this one trying, and I'll not be talked into false ones by a man who is better at asking than I am at answering. I've said the same to her."

Edwin let it go. It was, he thought, the answer of a man who had honestly tried, more than once, in the dark, and it was more than most men would have given him.

"I'm walking the field at first light," he said. "I'll be at that gate at five. I'd be glad if you were there. Not in the field. At the gate."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose

Peri had said nothing through all of it. She had stood a pace behind Edwin with her arms folded and had watched the priest the whole time, the way she had watched the bends of the tower road on her first morning, checking a thing in front of her against a picture she already had. She watched the lantern until it went round the corner.

"He blesses fields," she said. "Out of a book, in a robe, in the spring. He stood in that field on the twelfth of Seedmonth doing something out of the book, and the rings started in the spring, and now he won't go in it and won't say why." She laid the items out one after another, flat, the way he had taught her that week to lay out a reading before saying what it meant. "I'm not saying anything yet. But the Weave showed me a man in a robe when I asked what I'd have to fight, and I've just watched one stand in a lane and refuse to explain himself."

"He's the parish priest," said Edwin. "Every parish has one. They all bless fields, out of the same book, in the same robe, and I'd expect most of them would walk that field tomorrow if you asked them and see nothing in it but barley."

"I know that. I thought of that while he was talking, and it's why I'm not saying anything." She unfolded her arms. "There are a thousand men in robes in the kingdom and I'll have to look at every one of them the same way until I know better, and that's not fair to him, and I'm going to do it anyway, because it's the only picture I've got. So he goes in the file. Under his own name, with the date, and what he said."

"Put him in the file," said Edwin, "and put next to him the one thing about him tonight that wasn't ordinary. Not that he blessed the field; they all do. That he came out here in the dark to tell a stranger, to his face, that he wouldn't walk it, before the stranger could hear it from anybody else. A man with something to hide doesn't usually do that."

"A man with something to hide might do exactly that," said Peri, "if he were clever." But she wrote it down, both parts, by the light from the kitchen window, and he saw her write came out to say it himself and underline it, which was fair.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Peri, who had talked all the way up the stairs, was asleep almost at once; he heard the boards go quiet through the wall and envied her.

He lay and listened to the village.

There was not much of it. The pump handle, twice, late, somebody fetching water they had forgotten. A dog at the far end of the street with an opinion about something. A door. redacted sentence: unpublished prose redacted sentence: unpublished prose He had slept in a thousand parishes in his walking years, and every one of them had sounded like this at midnight, and he had not heard it in two hundred years.

At about eleven every sound stopped at once, the way a taproom goes quiet when the door opens, and he lay rigid for a long minute waiting to find out what had come in. Then the sounds started again, one by one. redacted sentence: unpublished prose He knew that. He had known it for three hundred years. He had lain there two hours anyway.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose At the foot of the list he wrote gate at five, because first light was twenty past and he wanted the low sun across the grass from the east. He had said so at supper, across the table, and Peri had read it upside down in his hand and nodded, and he had learned in a week that this impact meant she had it and would be there.

redacted sentence: unpublished prose
===END SCENE 33===

Your job: perform a rigorous consistency check. Check specifically:

1. Hard contradictions with canon files or with scenes 25-31/34-36, quoting both lines, with a suggested fix.
2. Whether any deferred/open question got resolved casually, or any binding-list rule from SCENES.md broken — specifically: Ferrin must NEVER be confirmed as culprit/villain NOR mocked/dismissed; the Weave's images (the "man in a robe" vision) must never be confirmed as accurate.
3. Date errors — Day 9 of the current arc = 23 Cornmonth. Check "twelfth of Seedmonth" and any other date references against the timeline for plausibility (Seedmonth is presumably an earlier month than Cornmonth in the calendar — verify month order in timeline.md) and against established chronology (when did the rings start, how many weeks/months ago).
4. Counts: Tess's "nine weeks" since Weedmonth to now (Day 9/23 Cornmonth) — check Weedmonth's calendar position and whether nine weeks is arithmetically consistent; the docking of "1s 3d" (one shilling threepence) mentioned by the alehouse keeper — check if this matches any earlier established figure; Sennet's Plowmonth walk of the field for drains — check consistency with any earlier scene about Sennet; Ferrin's "twelfth of Seedmonth" and "six fields" that morning — check against ferrin.md for any prior established figures; the hay in the loft (nine weeks of green hay, per scene 33) — check against loft/hay references in earlier scenes; "gate at five" — check against any established sunrise/schedule info; what Peri was told about "the man in the robe" in scene 02 — read that scene and check scene 33's description matches.
5. New facts these two scenes introduce that canon doesn't yet record (for later backfill) — just list them, don't resolve.

Report format: terse, numbered exactly matching the 5 categories above, using sub-numbering within each. Quote exact lines when citing contradictions. If a category has no findings, say "None found." Keep total report under 800 words if possible, but do not sacrifice necessary specificity/quotes for brevity.