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

I'll start by reading the skill brief and the files.

Findings

1. "the rider, who had been fed five times since the previous day's breakfast on Sorrel's instruction" — Part 1, viewpoint knowledge / count. Edwin saw the third supper at ten the previous night (sc. 22) and has been on his hill since; he cannot have the total, and it also sits against sc. 24, where the rider's joke is that the landlady underfed him. Replacement: "the rider, who had been fed at the landlady's every time he sat down since the previous evening, on Sorrel's instruction," — or keep the number and cut sc. 24's joke; the two cannot both stand.

2. "It was scythed to the redacted foot, both sides, the whole width of the vale's road." — Part 1, wrong noun for a real thing (and "the whole [X] of it" family). Verges run along a road's length; "the whole width" says the carriageway itself was mown. Replacement: "It was scythed to the redacted foot, both sides, and it had been done the whole way out of the village."

3. "Every parish mows its own stretch twice a year, because the council writes it in the parish book and I ask about it at the boundary walk." — Part 1, a "because" whose two halves are reasons for different things: the book is why it is uniform, and his asking is why he knows, and neither is why the parish mows. Replacement: "Every parish mows its own stretch twice a year. Each council writes the two dates in its own book, and I ask after them at the boundary walk, so I know they were kept."

4. "and every one of them would know within a mile where any stranger standing about had no business to be" — Part 1, cannot be restated flat; "know within a mile where" collapses two claims. Replacement: "and any one of them, coming on a stranger standing about, would know whether there was any business he could be standing about on, and could tell you the mile he was standing in."

5. "Everything but the coast is east of this bridge we're coming to" — Part 1, a fact overstated into a falsehood: his vale, his hill, ten parishes and the moors are all west of the bridge. Replacement: "Everything you haven't already walked is east of this bridge we're coming to."

6. "and was told it had gone out the day before yesterday, which meant nothing was owed to it and nothing waiting on it" — Part 1, the inference does not follow from the date and cannot be restated flat. Replacement: "and was told it had gone out the day before yesterday, which meant anything he wrote tonight would sit in that room until the next bag, and anything coming to him from the east had passed him going the other way."

7. "It was written in four different hands. The carrier's days for three villages... A guild notice... And low down, in the neatest hand of the four, a column of places and dates" — Part 1, count: four hands announced, three items given. Either name a fourth notice (a stray line of something dull — a lost dog, a sale of standing grass) or write "in three different hands ... in the neatest of the three."

8. "the due date was the tenth of Haymonth. It was the twenty-first of Cornmonth" / "Forty days." — Part 1, check the count against the calendar: on consecutive thirty-day months the interval is forty-one days, not forty. Confirm Haymonth immediately precedes Cornmonth and fix the figure to whatever the calendar gives; Edwin's exact number is the point of the beat.

9. "and clears it before what's in it is worth anything's while" — Part 1, a word doing a job it cannot do; "anything's while" is a coinage and the mechanism is left half-explained. Replacement: "and clears it before what breeds down there grows to a size worth something coming up out of it for."

10. "Out here it's exactly a thing with a date on it, and being late for it is exactly what being late for a hay cut is" — Part 1/Part 6, the second half is a tangle round a simple claim. Replacement: "Out here it is exactly a thing with a date on it, and being late for it costs the same way a late hay cut costs."

11. "She did not write it down, which he noticed, and which meant she was keeping it somewhere better than the notebook." — Part 1, an inference that does not follow (not writing a thing down means many things), plus Part 2 gesture. Replacement: "She did not write it down. Everything else that morning had gone straight into the notebook."

12. "He knew that road the way he knew everything east of the bridge" — Part 1, "that road" has no antecedent; the last named road is the one behind him. Replacement: "He knew the road in front of him the way he knew everything east of the bridge".

13. "he read the first limed waymarker on the far side like anybody else, to learn what it said" — Part 1/Part 6, the purpose clause restates the verb. Replacement: "he read the first limed waymarker on the far side like anybody else, because he did not already know the figure on it."

14. "The straight water's east." — VOICE §2 (people say what they mean): an exchange that needs sc. 22 to parse; "the straight water" arrives with a definite article and no referent. Replacement: "The straight water I asked you about, in the flat country — that's east."

15. "He did not ask which column it went in." — VOICE §2, a callback carrying meaning on its own; a reader of this scene does not know she keeps columns. Either say it ("She kept two columns, things she knew and things people said, and he did not ask which one it went in") or replace with "He did not ask what she had written."

16. "She said it without embarrassment, because it was her trade and she had studied." — Part 1, a justification that is not true: she is eighteen, six days out, and has no trade. Replacement: "She said it without embarrassment, because she had done the reading and was not ashamed of having done it."

17. "watching the hedges of the best-kept road she had ever mistrusted." — VOICE §2, the resolving button: an epigram that closes the scene like a bow, and the most portable sentence in the scene sits last. Replacement: end on the act — "...set off ahead of him, on the crown of the road, hand loose by the sword, reading the hedges."

redacted sentence: unpublished prose Replacement: "The rises will keep," said Edwin. "The verge is the thing to look at."

19. "It isn't that nothing bad can happen on this road. It's that..." and "That's not a sign. It's geography." — Part 5, edwin.md rule 13: one contrastive is/isn't pair per scene, and it may not also be the scene's aphorism. Keep the first (it is the scene's argument); replace the second with a flat form: "Everything you haven't walked is east of that bridge. That's geography, not a sign."

20. "and, famously, sometimes sat there for days" — Part 2/Part 3, famous to whom; the narrator winks where a person should say it. Replacement: "and, by the postmistress's own account, sometimes sat there for days."

The device a second round would be about is the three-fold "wished him good morning by name" (carter, plum-seller, postmistress): it is the scene's proof that the road is his, and by the third instance it has hardened into a formula the reader is counting rather than a fact accumulating. To make it work, vary what each recognition costs him — one greeting, one that stops him and wants something small answered, and the postmistress who greets him and then asks about the western bag — so the pattern reads as the road's traffic rather than a refrain.