Notes:

GN didn't exactly describe what school was like, so I'm going to take some liberties with subjects and grades and so on. Thanks!

DISCLAIMER: Refer to chapter one. I only own Kaisha and Maggie; they're not from the book. Thanks.

Chapter 2

Sabriel's first year at Wyverley was confusing even by anyone's standards. After being placed in Primary Form because she was only five and not yet old enough to be with 'the older girls', she found that she actually liked Wyverley a lot, once she had gotten over her shyness and missing father. Everything was new to her, the other students towered over her like giants (giantesses, to be exact), and the school was so big! It was even bigger than the House (imagine that!).

On the first day all Sabriel could do was stare at all the other little girls staring back. She felt uncomfortable and bashfully turned away whenever the Primary Form teacher asked her something. "The quiet one," the teacher remarked, and then looked over at a rambunctious girl across the room who was screaming at the top of her voice. "Wish Ellimere would be more like her," she said to an assistant, who nodded tiredly. Sabriel overheard that and immediately hated Ellimere: she disliked, with an intense childish resentment, the loud, noisy girl with blonde pigtails who annoyed her and everybody else.

She did have friends of a sort, though. Kaisha and Maggie were both nice and good playmates, although, Sabriel thought, Maggie was a bit too overbearing at times.

At Midwinter that year, her father suddenly materialised in the hall. Sabriel didn't remembered how he got there; later, she could only recall rushing into his rather soggy embrace, as it was 'pouring buckets' out. He had promised he would try to come in the spring sometime too, but he never did. But father had come at the end of the school year, and Sabriel was happy enough with that. She clung to him until he went away again, waving goodbye till he climbed up and hill and disappeared over the rise.

The First Form passed more quickly. Now that they actually had real lessons to go to, Sabriel felt like she'd been dropped on her head as they scrambled everywhere to classes. She found she was very good at English and Science, okay at Geography, and absolutely horrible at Mathematics; she just didn't get it. The halls and corridors seemed awfully long to their shorter legs as the older students walked by leisurely. She did all her assignments earnestly and was therefore known as 'the serious one'.

Father visited again that year. He looked older and thinner than Sabriel remembered and she felt vaguely worried. Next time, he told her, he would come in the form of a sending. Library, he said, second window on the west wall, one o'clock after midnight. Sabriel awaited him with increasing curiosity and a small bit of doubt. But father did come, his sending rustling the curtains and unfolding, slowly, through the window. He smiled at her, and when she ran to hug him, he felt just as warm and alive.

One embarrassing incident was when Sabriel dropped a bowl of tomato soup at the meal table, shattering the bowl and getting soup all over her dressed. She was scolded shrilly by an enraged Cook and Headmistress as she tried to scrub tomato out of her dress and blazer. Tomato, she found, was dreadfully hard to wash. She spent the rest of the term with a pink dress.

Sabriel decided she didn't like pink dresses.