The corner of Soph's mouth quirks up slightly. "A good start, I think. It can be your first recipe." 

She gets out a loaf of bread, a bread knife (which she explains has serrations, little curves along the edge that help it cut bread more easily), a tomato, a piece of meat from the icebox, a head of lettuce, and a block of butter. 

"We're going to learn basic knife skills today as you assemble a simple sandwich. Sandwiches are a kind of food where you take some kind of contents - vegetables, meat, cheese - and press it between two slices of bread, which makes it easy to pick up and handle casually if you're out hunting or at the market or otherwise doing things with your hands while eating."

"Hunting? Market?" Isabel tilts her head.

"- neither are particularly important to cooking directly, so I'll ask you to ask milord. Both are ways you can get ingredients, whether for cooking or for other things. The main point is that sandwiches are convenient for if you are doing something else while eating."

Isabel nods. "I understand."

"I'm going to make a sandwich in front of you, and you can watch, and then you can try. Please come in close and watch carefully..."

The lesson breezes by after that. There's so much to learn about the proper ways to cut things - bridge grip versus claw grip, what parts of the lettuce or tomato should be eaten and which shouldn't be, how to slice meat thinly, how to slice bread thinly without going sideways... She's not particularly skilled yet, but she's learning. Soph is a much better teacher than Maxwell. 

"Thank you," she says at the end of the lesson. "Maxwell said that you're taking extra time to teach me, and I really appreciate it. You're a good teacher."

Soph sighs lowly. 

"I'm simply doing what my master requires of me, nothing more. Though... you have proven a better student than I'd feared. Perhaps milord will eventually allow you to join the staff on kitchen duty, if you continue to progress."

Isabel shivers as the praise hits her, and smiles brightly. "That sounds like it would be wonderful. Thank you again."

"Again, I'm only doing my duty. And now it's time for you to return to your room, Isabel."

Isabel sighs, but nods. "Alright." 

She's quiet on the way back.

There's not much to do back in her room but try to read.

She works at it doggedly, sounding out words as she goes. After her introduction to sandwiches, a few of the pages in the cookbook are a lot easier to understand - but she's not really sure if she's really reading so much as just guessing from the pictures. There are instructional diagrams; they seem to be describing how to cut up lettuce and tomatoes, like she learned from Soph. This word is clearly "tomato", can she find "lettuce"? 

She can. The little sentence-glue words are also starting to come a little more naturally to her now. So this word must be... "cut", but it starts with a d... It's shown with a picture of small pieces of tomato that have been cut in two directions, into little cubes... It's got a c in it... how does she pronounce this... "deece?" That doesn't sound right. "Di-see?" That sounds a little better. D-i-c-e, dice the tomato. This would be so much easier if she had someone else to check her...

She struggles onwards, anyway.

... she forgot to ask Soph whether a tomato was a vegetable or a fruit.

Well, she can ask next time.

She takes a break from her reading, and turns back to beading. It's easier. And perhaps she can figure out knots... 

Time passes.

Maxwell favors her with another visit the next morning, that same easy smile on his face that he always wears. 

"How's my beautiful bird doing this morning?"

Isabel pops up with a smile and hugs Maxwell. "You really came back! Thank you. I'm... I don't know the emotion. Frustrated, I think? I'm trying to read these books, but it's hard..." She frowns. "I'm starting to be able to sound things out, but I don't know if my pronunciation is right. 'Die-cee' the tomatoes? On-ix? Am-eh-thist?"

Maxwell smiles slightly. "Dai-suh the tomatoes. The others you have right. You're picking things up more quickly than I expected, it's only been a few weeks and that with just me occasionally helping you..." 

He taps his lips. "I wonder..." 

"Wonder what?"

"I'm considering whether to get you a tutor for reading and writing. It would be... difficult, to get someone willing to instruct you properly, with the respect you deserve... and also expensive..." He bites the inside of his lip.

"Expensive?"

"... oh, I haven't told you about money, have I?"

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small gold coin. "This is a coin. It's used to trade for things you want. The idea is that... if one person makes food, and another person makes bracelets, and another person makes dresses, and so on... Then instead of having to trade your dress for food, which is awkward, because what if the person making food doesn't want a dress? - then instead you can trade for money, and then that money can be traded for whatever you want, because most people want something that can be traded for whatever they want. And different things cost different amounts of money because different things take different amounts of work."

He strokes Isabel's hair. "'Expensive' means that it takes a lot of effort to do, so if you want someone to do it for you you have to pay a lot of coins for it, which represent a lot of work. It gets more complicated than that in practice, because of people whose purposes are to serve others, among other things, but that's how it works on the basic level." 

Isabel nods thoughtfully. "Soph said that you could get ingredients from a market or by hunting... do those things involve money?"

Maxwell smiles a little broader. "Good question. Yes, a market is where people gather to trade things for money and money for things. If you want to get ingredients yourself, then the other option - well, one of many options - is to get meat from animals you hunt and kill."

Isabel blinks. "Meat is... animals? Like the talking fox in the book? That - I must have something wrong."

"Real animals aren't intelligent and can't talk. They're ruled entirely by their instincts, with no ability to put together concepts like you and I can."

"Oh." Isabel breathes a sigh of relief. "That wasn't a good emotion."

Maxwell's face falls a little. "I don't want to hurt you. I think the most likely emotion is... fear? You were scared that there were people out there who'd eat something alive and sentient."