***Quite possibly a double update for a lot of you, or potentially even a triple one, so make sure you've read chapters 38 and 39 before you read this, or not all of it will make sense!***

By the time Biyu, the palace head chef, dropped Yeonhee off at the university for her Tuesday morning lectures while she was out for a food run, Yeonhee was exhausted.  Yixing clearly liked dancing, and he was a very thorough teacher, and despite his own exhaustion, it very much looked to Yeonhee like it was helping him to relax and forget about all the stress of the day, and they’d ended up perfecting her waltzing until well after three in the morning.  Once Yeonhee had got the feel of it and do more than a few steps without getting confused and tripping or putting the wrong foot forward or back, he’d plugged his phone into a surround-sound stereo set so she could get used to putting the steps to music.  Her muscles were aching all over and her feet felt like they were going to drop off, and Mihae had to wake her up several times before even the first hour of lectures was over.

Baekhyun had to prod her awake when she fell asleep in her food at lunch, Jongin snickering in the background.

“Baked beans are honestly not the best choice of pillow,” Baekhyun told her as he used some paper napkins Chanyeol had brought to clean the sauce of Yeonhee’s face.  Then, in a lower voice, he asked, “what would your boyfriend think if he saw you like this?”

“He’d laugh,” Yeonhee admitted honestly.

“Were you with him yesterday?” Baekhyun asked.  “Is that why you’re so tired?”

Yeonhee nodded.  “He’s teaching me how to dance.”

Baekhyun raised his eyebrows, looking somewhat impressed.

“Horizontally?” Jongin chipped in, waggling his eyebrows.

Tiredly, Yeonhee flipped him off.  “ you, Jongin.”

That evening, as Yeonhee and Baekhyun broke out some of Baekhyun’s favourite biscuits and settled in his room to live-stream a popular singing contest, Yeonhee unloaded as many of her worries as she could onto him, starting with what Chen had told her about the spying equipment in her room.

“Sh*t,” Baekhyun commented incredulously around a mouthful of biscuit.  “That’s really creepy.  Like, they could have filmed you changing and stuff.”

Yeonhee shuddered.  “I feel like my privacy has been violated.”

He crammed another biscuit into his mouth and turned down the sound on his laptop.  “I’m not surprised.”

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, watching the singers on screen.  Baekhyun winced as one of them went badly out of tune.

“It’s not like you have anything scandalous for anybody to uncover,” he said after a few moments.  “I bet people will just think pencilmania is cool.”

“I’m dating the prince,” Yeonhee pointed out.

“Yes, but you two are so tame.”  Baekhyun rolled his eyes.  “The furthest you’ve gone with him is holding hands and kissing.  If they caught that on camera they’d be seriously disappointed.”

Yeonhee was just about able to laugh in response.

“The expression on your face whenever you get a text from him is sickeningly cute,” he added.  “You seem really happy.  What do you guys even do all the time for you to look so disgustingly sappy?”

“Depends,” Yeonhee mumbled, dropping her head onto his shoulder.  “At the moment, he’s teaching me how to dance because he’s taking me to the inaugural spring ball a week on Saturday.”

“Is that a good idea?” Baekhyun asked.  “Isn’t it a bit soon to let the country know about you both?”

“Apparently it’s a masquerade theme, otherwise I don’t think he’d dare.”

Baekhyun paused for a moment, and then nodded slowly.  “The inaugural spring ball, though,” he said.  “That’s ing massive.  D*mn.  What a date.”

“I’m a bit nervous,” Yeonhee admitted.  “Every eligible young person from high society is going to be there, and people are probably going to try to figure out who I am.  And I’m really not good at dancing yet, and I don’t want to make a fool out of myself.  It’ll probably reflect badly on Yixing if I do and he has enough on his plate already.”

“Pretty sure you not dancing well is not even going to be in the top hundred scandals he’s been in,” Baekhyun said.  “Biscuit?”

A text from Yixing on Wednesday saying that his mother was happily setting aside smart tailored jackets and more trousers for her to try on the next time she was in the palace reminded Yeonhee of the walk-in closet and the sad fate of the queen’s many splendid dresses, and she found herself sifting through the internet for the occasions she’d worn them.  To her absolute horror, she found no fewer than three mainstream news outlets that had huge features on all the dresses the queen had worn over the course of three or four years, along with all the styles and colours, and a host of blogs dedicated to the queen’s wardrobe and critiquing or fangirling over it.  There was even a forum on one website stuffed full of people talking about various of the dresses.

The level of scrutiny was insane.  Even for the less distinctive, more casual clothing that the queen wore, she was criticised for pulling out the same outfit on more than one occasion, unless it was really so bland or unobtrusive that they didn’t care (though often the criticisms there were that she wasn’t dressing properly and in a manner that would make one take her seriously as queen).  She really couldn’t win.

There was one blog, though, that Yeonhee found herself wasting hours on because the person running it actually put some proper time and effort into everything she said.  It was called Royal Fashion, and the young woman who’d started it largely talked about make-up and ball gowns.  The royal in the title was more a marketing ploy, but there was a section of the site dedicated to everything the queen had ever worn to an official function, starting with her wedding dress.

Yeonhee remembered some of the dresses, but she was surprised at how many iconic ones there were, all of which had been given names.  Nobody could fault the wedding dress because it looked so stunningly beautiful, and there were only three that were iconic because they were terrible (every few months or so, the queen appeared to be dressed in very questionable things – nothing that infringed on modesty, but the shapes of the dresses were sometimes extremely bizarre and experimental.

She recognised some of the dresses from the closet, too.  She was pretty sure she’d seen The Iceberg, which (she discovered) h