With some help from Dave, Lily managed to make it all the way to the kitchen. Once he was sure that she could stand securely on her own, he settled in a chair which he pulled up to the counter. Lily looked around the kitchen and then at him. "So should I just start looking around or do you know what you'd like to eat?" She asked him with a smile.
"Whatever you wish to make, I would gladly eat. There is fresh meat in that compartment with the ice, fresh vegetables in the compartment above it and I believe there may be some bread left under that cloth on the counter." Dave pointed each place out to her as he spoke. "Would you like me to help you?"
"No. I use to help my mother do the cooking for our family. I think I have every thing I'm going to need." Lily got to work, pulling meat, which appeared to be venison out of the ice. She then pulled a handful of carrots and potatoes from their compartment. "Where do you get all of this food from?" She looked up from peeling the vegetables.
"I hunt for the meat and the vegetables come from the gardens that I raid in the local villages." He noticed her wince at that statement. "Lily, I don't expect you to understand or forgive me for what I did to your village. I'm not sorry though. If I hadn't been there, I would have never seen you. I've been very angry for a very long time, but I don't feel remorseful for my actions."
Lily nodded silently, She hadn't expected an explanation or for him to feel terrible about it. "Well . . . I use to help my mother in her garden, perhaps when I'm feeling up to it, I could go to one of the nearby villages and buy seeds. If I managed to get them to grow, you wouldn't have to raid any more gardens." She started looking around. "I don't suppose during any of your raiding trips you happened to have taken any herbs did you?" She looked up to find him smiling widely at her. "What?"
"You want to plant a garden here for the castle? Does that mean you wish to stay here with me?" He continued to smile at her. He was glad that he was looking at her, because if he hadn't, he would have missed the small smile that crossed her face.
"I don't really have any place else to go, and besides the disastrous start, you haven't mistreated me. So why not try and make a new home here? It's clear to me that you have no concept of how to take care of yourself or this castle. Clearly you need someone around to look after you!" She grinned, but didn't make eye contact with him. "Now about those herbs?"
He laughed. "I'm not much of a cook, that's true. I think there is some kind of herb over near the door drying. I was not sure what it was, but it smelled like it was something you could put on food."
Lily walked over to the door and found the drying greens. She took the bunch down and put it to her nose. "What you have here is some Rosemary, and it will do well with the meat." She took a few sprigs and hung the rest back up. Dave watched as she brought it over to the counter, crushed it in her hands and rubbed it on the venison. She slid the hunk of meat onto the spit and placed it over the fire in the hearth. She then found a pan, placed some water in it and put the vegetables to boiling. Lily then cleaned her hands, and came to sit down across the counter from him. "All right! What would you like to know about me?"
He chuckled at her frankness. Sometimes she was more like Lilith than she could ever know. "Were you an only child in your family?" He asked.
"No. I had two brothers, Joseph, who was older than I and Peter who was a year younger. We didn't spend much time together though. They spent most of their time in school or helping my father doing carpentry." Lily answered.
"Why did you not go to school with your brothers? Did you not have an interest in learning anything other than cooking and gardening?" Little did Dave know he had struck a nerve.
"I wanted very badly to go to school. I use to follow them to the schoolhouse and wait for all the boys to go inside. Then I would sneak in and hide in the back. You see it wasn't considered proper for a girl to attend school! Their time was better spent learning skills in order to be a good wife and mother! It never failed that they would find me hiding in the back of that school. The schoolmaster would drag me from the schoolhouse to the village elders, who would then drag me back to my parents. My father would then beat me, to 'Get the devil out of me'! Apparently, the devil was in me quite often, because I kept trying to go back." Lily's face had turned scarlet and her voice, venomous. " I only wanted to learn what the boys were learning. As it was, I was sneaking books that they would bring home and reading them before they knew that they were missing. I never knew what the big deal was!"
Dave had witnessed another such incident, many centuries before. The story of not treating women as equals was, the whole reason Lilith had been so unhappy in the garden with Adam. Personally, he thought women deserved to be treated the same. Women in his experience were far more intelligent than men had given them credit for. Lily was no exception, and it angered him to hear that her father would have hit her just for wanting to attend school. He watched as she stood, turned the meat on the spit and returned to her seat. The kitchen was beginning to fill with a wonderful scent. "What were your favorite things to read?"
"I read some literature once...Shakespeare I think. I also read some science text one time. It was very interesting." Lily smiled, she enjoyed talking about the things she had read.
"How did you learn to read?" Dave asked as he watched her take the vegetables and meat out of the hearth. She fixed plates for both of them and put them on the counter.
"We were taught to read so that we could read the holy bible, but we wouldn't want the women to learn more than that. They might get out of control." She smiled. They both continued to talk while they eat the venison and vegetables.