It was a pretty enough pattern, too.

Yet whenever one of the children I so much longed to play with down on the paved roadway beneath our tower caught sight of it he rose instantly out of the dust and hurled oaths and ill-words at me--aye, and oftentimes other missiles that hurt even worse--at a little lonely boy who was breaking his heart with loving him up there on the tower.
"Come down and be killed, foul brood of the Red Axe!" the children cried.
And with that they ran as near as they dared, and spat on the wall of our house, or at least on the little wooden panel which opened inward in the great trebly spiked iron door of the Duke's court-yard.
But this night of the first home-coming of the Little Playmate I awoke crying and fearful in the dead vast of the night, when all the other children who would not speak to me were asleep.

Then pulling on my comfortable shoes of woollen list (for my father gave me all things to make me warm, thinking me delicate of body), and drawing the many-patched coverlet of the bed about me, I clambered up the stone stairway to the very top of the tower in which I slept.

The moon was broad, like one of the shields in the great hall, whither I went often when the great Duke was not at home, and when old Hanne would be busy cleaning the pavement and scrubbing viciously at the armor of the iron knights who stood on pedestals round about.
"One day I shall be a man-at-arms, too," I said once to Hanne, "and ride a-foraying with Duke Ironteeth." But old Hanne only shook her head and answered: "Ill foraying shalt thou make, little shrimp.

Such work as thine is not done on horseback--keep wide from me, _toadchen_, touch me not!" For even old Hanne flouted me and would not let me approach her too closely, all because once I had asked her what my father did to witches, and if she were a witch that she crossed herself and trembled whenever she passed him in the court-yard.
Now, having little else to do, I loved to look down from the top of the tower at all times.