Veylan moved the chair after I closed my eyes.
"Where is it?"
"To my left." I pointed toward the place I remembered.
"How far?"
"An arm's length."
"Open them."
The chair stood to my right, well beyond my reach. He had moved a wooden box into the place I remembered.
I looked at the box.
"That was deliberate."
"Yes. You had your eyes closed."
On the bench beside him, the library book lay open at the marked-space exercise. I had copied the measurements and brought three objections to the author's method. Veylan had answered the first by showing me I could mistake a box for a chair.
I decided to keep the other two until I had earned them.
The room was a small practice chamber attached to the main hall. No active class used its feed that afternoon. Chalk marked a square of floor two meters ahead of me. Outside it stood the chair, the box and a row of wooden markers.
The first task involved no Aether at all. Look. Close my eyes. Describe what I had seen. Open them and compare.
