The Fool jingles miserably to her place in the Queen's court.
She is not a jester. A clown, perhaps, derisively. She is a fool, for answering the Queen's summons some years ago instead of running away, for not having run away since.
She doesn't even know when she first met the Queen, sneaking about in commoner's guise. But the Queen knows, and remembers, and it left enough of an impression that when she was shunted onto the throne by a series of misfortunes she decided to pluck her out of her life and into the royal court.
The Queen, with her musical laugh and her radiant smile, finds the juxtaposition of a miserable jester hilarious. It matters to her not that the Fool can't juggle and won't do cartwheels, as long as she wears the stupid outfit with the garish colors and the annoying bells and the dour expression that completes the grand joke that is her life.
The Fool, in an effort to make something of her time, or at least perhaps become so abhorrently irritating that even the Queen cannot laugh at her, takes up the lute.
She cannot read music, lacks the faintest sense of rhythm, and plays incredibly loudly while the days petitioners seek audience.
Needless to say, the Queen loves it.
Her sworn protector, trained from birth to be the Queen's blade, inches ever so slowly closer to the Fool over the course of her performance, the faintest twitch of annoyance visible on her face to the trained eye.
"If you insist upon pursuing music while Her Majesty speaks, I will see you tortured upon the rack." She hisses, under her breath.
The Fool strums a discordant note with such force that one of her lute strings snaps, a loud twang echoing throughout the hall.
"You see me tortured now, fair knight." She says, smiling. "For my lowly body to grace Her Majesty's rack would be a marked improvme-"
The Knight takes her lute and snaps it in her hands, thwacking her atop the head with one of the fragments; causing such a fit of laughter from the Queen that she's forced to excuse herself for several minutes to regain her composure.
