A Pattern Not Given

Every keeper learns the patterns by heart. There are four hundred and they are not decoration, each one tunes the canopy for a season, a wind, an angle of sun. I know all four hundred. My mother tested me on them until I dreamed in them. So when I came up to the loom-walk that morning and saw the eastern canopy carrying a pattern that was not one of the four hundred, I did not think it was beautiful, although it was. I thought it was a fault. I ran the diagnostics. The loom was healthy. I checked the pattern feed. I had fed it the correct seasonal pattern, the one for the start of the dry wind, and the loom had accepted it, and then the loom had done something no loom in two hundred years of keeping had ever done. It had altered the pattern. Improved it, I would learn later, though that morning I had no word for it except wrong, and I stood on the walk with the wind picking up and felt the weight my aunties had warned me about settle fully onto my shoulders.