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I wanted my mother-in-law to be happy. Apparently Alice did, too, and had kept her real reaction to herself. Veronika would be an older mother, facing her fifth childbirth, and I figured she needed all the good will she could gather up.

Finally we were able to escape to our room.

We weren’t talking much. We were both tired, and I was feeling relieved because for once my feet didn’t hurt.

I was still glad to take off my shoes, and I wiggled my toes with a contented sigh.

Looked like Eli was going to spend the night here, and I was too tired to have any more words with him.

“Has Felicia said Ahren and Hans have gone?” I asked. She hadn’t said anything to me, but I hadn’t asked.

“They left last night. So she was being brave tonight. That was what all the smiling and laughing were about.” Eli had peeled off his evening coat and his good grigori vest. His shirt seemed to have twenty little buttons. A lot of work.

“So Ahren won’t get to finish Ball Week. I don’t know if he found anyone he admired.” I had only thought of Hans.

“The boy has enough to worry about,” Eli said as he finally got rid of his shirt and dropped it into the clothes hamper. “Getting married is probably the last thing he should be doing right now. Ahren will have other Wizards’ Balls. Two or three more, perhaps. Plenty of time.”

I was rolling my stockings down as another thought made me pause halfway.

“If this Wizards’ Ball is this tense, if the Koreans already hate the Japanese because they’re occupying Korea…

and Japan is allying with Germany against the rest of the world…

and England and all its colonies, present and past, are against Germany and Japan…

and Germany may invade Belgium and France… ”

Eli had pulled on his pajamas, since the night was chilly. He sat abruptly in the easy chair. His face was bleak. “This may be the last Wizards’ Ball for some years,” he said.

“Maybe ever. Think of all the ill will that will build up. All the magicians who will die at the hands of other magicians. That’s going to happen, in the war that’s coming.” I took a deep breath and asked the question that had been haunting me. “Do you have a side in this fight? Will you go?”

Startled, he swung his head toward me, his hair trailing over his shoulders. “I suppose that depends on what the tsar decides to do. And what he decides to do may depend on what side the godless Russians choose. What do you think about your country?”

“Texoma won’t do anything. It’s small and poor, and I can’t see us picking a dog in this fight.

If you mean what used to be the United States of America…

Britannia will go with England, for sure.

Dixie? Whoever will pay the most for cotton, I bet.

New America… New America is organizing a militia to take over Texoma and any other land it can grab back from Canada and Mexico.

That’ll be a war fought in this country.

If I were New America, I’d pick this time to do it, since everyone will be in a tizzy over the bigger war. ”

“There will be war all around us,” Eli said.

We looked at each other. Grim moment.

“If all the worst things happen, yes,” I said.

“I got no ideas about the rest of Europe—Spain or Portugal, Romania, Czechoslovakia. I know there are lots of little countries I haven’t even heard of.

Ahren’s folks have settled in England. Hans’s money is in Switzerland with his uncle.

What do you think the Swiss will do? Any idea? ”

“There’s one Swiss alchemist here. I talked to him. He thinks his country will remain neutral. It’s too small to do otherwise.”

“I think we’ll have to do something,” I admitted.

“We probably can’t sit out the war in Texoma.

Maybe someone will shoot this Hitler and it will all be over before it’s started.

” I got up to brush my teeth. “If I had to pick right now, I’d say I was against the Germans and Japanese and whoever joins up with them.

It’s awful to pick Jews to kill. It’s like picking people with black hair, or people with grigori vests.

It might be us, next. Also, if Felicia marries this Hans, I want to be on the same team as her. ”

“What if the tsar decides to align with one or the other?” he said. “What if he wants me to go overseas?”

“I bet people all over San Diego are having this same conversation in different languages,” I said.

“The tsar has been yanking you backward and forward for a couple of years, Eli. Your dad was bad. You are good. He can’t seem to make up his mind whether to trust you or not.

Or whether… well, what it looks like to other people at the court if he does let you back in. ”

Eli would have liked to have denied that, but it was true, so he couldn’t. My husband’s unhappiness made me want to kill his father all over again, and spit on his grave. But then, I was depressed by all the choices in front of Eli and me. Choices we would have to make.

I hoped he and I would make the same one. But I wasn’t counting on it.