Sabriel jumps when she feels the snowball and stops singing for a moment, whipping her head around to look. Ah- there's the culprit. But despite the childishness of throwing that snowball in the first place, she has work to do, and she's not going to interrupt that for a snowball fight. So she shakes the snow out of her hair, resuming her work and her song, an Old Kingdom ballad about a man who died horribly, came back as a ravenous Dead creature who tried to devour his lover multiple times, then died for good when his lover finally pushed him into the river, with a final verse about how the dead should be left to rest.

But an hour later she's just finishing her work, singing a far less morbid song about frost spirits and the bird of dawning. It's a song she remembers from her childhood in the Old Kingdom, how the Bird of Dawning saved spring from the six spirits of winter. When she sees the man from before, she grins, singing about how the Bird of Dawning was pelted with snow and sleet and icicles, but still kept spring safe- and then scooped up a snowball from the pile of snow she'd just made and hurled it at the man, not bothering to hide what she's doing this time.