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/19-the-two-lists.md, read after scenes 01–18 in the same directory (they bind what is on the page; 17–19 are one afternoon). redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished Also chapters/005-the-sample.md — the groundwork this restages, which the author rates good and which drew no comments from him.
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.
🔧 Read .claude/skills/pre-david-pass/SKILL.md
✅ 319 lines, 20190 chars
🔧 Read draft/book-01/scenes/19-the-two-lists.md
✅ 32 lines, 3904 chars
🔧 Bash: ls draft/book-01/scenes/ && cat draft/book-01/scenes/1[5-8]*.md
✅ 177 lines, 21161 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose
✅ 44 lines, 2191 chars
🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished chapters/005-the-sample.md && cat not…
✅ 46 lines, 2189 chars
🔧 Read notes/canon/characters/sorrel.md
✅ 842 lines, 52121 chars
🔧 Read chapters/005-the-sample.md
✅ 120 lines, 17621 chars
🔧 Bash: cd redacted/draft/book-01/scenes && grep -n "eleven\|class runs\|Drovers\|rider\|compos…
✅ 50 lines, 22300 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '83,111p' chapters/005-the-sample.md > /tmp/a.txt && sed -n '3,32p' draft/book-01/…
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🔧 Bash: redacted sentence: unpublished prose unpublished | head -40
✅ 7 lines, 723 chars
🔧 Bash: sed -n '60,110p' notes/canon/world/farm-teaching.md
✅ 51 lines, 2857 chars
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The line is an edit of ch. redacted sentence: unpublished prose What replaced it does not parse: a course is not "at the compost". A course is at a lesson.
Replacement: "the course is at the compost cantrip and I won't have…"
redacted sentence: unpublished prose The count is inherited from ch. 005, and scenes 01–18 have since contradicted it twice. Scene 04: "The eleven farmwives from the west parishes and the carter's boy"; scene 10: "Edwin taught eleven farmwives and one boy"; scene 07: "eleven farmwives and a boy who kept a list". And Peri has been in the class since scene 17 — "every wrist soft, Miss Millbrook's included". The class Edwin is worrying about is thirteen wrists, not eleven, and he is the one who counts.
Replacement: drop the number — "I won't have a class of stiff wrists while I'm off looking at a field" — or, if the count is wanted, "thirteen wrists".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose Edited from ch. redacted sentence: unpublished prose As now written, "for the coast" reads first as the voice she uses when addressing the coast parishes, and only on a second pass as the voice she keeps for a coast turn; the edit removed the noun that disambiguated it, and this is the last line of the scene, where Part 6 wants the plainest form.
Replacement: "in the voice she used when the coast weather was turning".
redacted sentence: unpublished prose sorrel.md rule 3, added 2026-08-27, after ch. redacted sentence: unpublished prose This scene is about her two lists and contains no ordinal; her five turns are the frightened-before opener, "Lists.", "Mm.", the Drovers, and "Two weeks."
Replacement: keep the tic and add the ordinal to the closing exchange rather than this one — "'Two weeks,' Sorrel agreed. 'Second item on mine, then: the classes.'" — or, if the silent-adding gesture is expendable, "'Mm,' said Sorrel. 'Oilskin for the registers. Fourth on yours.'" Flagged, not urgent: the rule is Working and adopted-unless-overruled.
5. *"It's forty miles and a day's looking. redacted sentence: unpublished prose 005. Eighty miles there and back plus one day's looking is four to five days at any pace the book has used (Peri plans eighteen to twenty a day, scene 15); the stated reasons do not reach two weeks even with bad roads, so the figure reads as arriving from somewhere other than the sum a man who does sums out loud would do. If it is deliberate padding by a man who has not left in eleven years, nothing on the page says so.
Replacement: if kept, one clause of cover — "Call it two weeks, because I have not done forty miles in eleven years and I am not going to find out I can on the road." Otherwise leave; it was not commented on in ch. 005.
The device a second round would be about is the two lists themselves, and what is not on them: Peri Millbrook is bound to Edwin until fulfilled, reported the east to him the previous evening, and is planning her own provisioning — and across a whole afternoon of packing for a journey east she appears on neither sheet and in neither mouth, which leaves the scene standing in the shadow of a thread it does not know it is standing in (Part 5, raised and dropped). Making it work costs one item or one line — the girl on the second list, in the same hand as the ford feud, or a Sorrel question Edwin does not answer — and the alternative is to have the absence be deliberate on Edwin's part, which the scene would then need to show him doing rather than simply omitting.