As the occupation continued, it seemed that the Germans had brought not only brutal laws with them but foul weather. The cruel and bitter winter gave way to an unbearable summer. Everywhere she looked, Karolina saw neighbors flushed with anger over a minor slight and laborers whose faces wept sweat as the heat crushed the city of Kraków.

Południca, Lady Midday, skulked among them in her dress of bridal white, causing men and women to faint from overwork and her burning touch. None of the humans noticed her, but to Karolina, she was as real as the heat itself. She was like a wicked sister to the Lakanica, driven from her home in the fields just as the meadow spirit had been.

Inside the toy shop, however, it was dark and cool and pleasant. And it was on a hot August day in 1940 that Rena acquired a new friend: a gray mouse seeking relief from the heat. The mouse had been coaxed from his hiding place in the wall by the smell of bread, and the butter the Dollmaker had slathered on top of it. The butter seemed like an excessive indulgence—or it would have if the Dollmaker hadn’t presented two slices of bread to Rena for her lunch. He might go to bed with an empty belly, but at least Rena wouldn’t. The Trzmiels and their Jewish neighbors received the smallest allocation of food now, and they had turned as pale as dust since the arrival of the Germans in Kraków.

Rena had just raised the slice of bread to her lips when she spied the mouse from the corner of her eye, its pink nose twitching. “Oh! Does he live here too?” she asked, pointing.

The Dollmaker looked up from the toy elephant he had been stitching a leg onto. “Not that I’ve noticed before,” he said. “He must be a new addition to the shop.”

“May I feed him?” asked Rena.

“If you feed it, it won’t ever go away,” Karolina said with a scowl. “Don’t give up your bread for that thing.”

“But he looks like a gentle mouse,” Rena said. “Don’t you think so, Karolina?”

Karolina could not pretend to coo over a mouse. It was far too close to being a rat, though at least the mouse was only as big as she was. “Awful creature,” she said to Rena.

“Karolina doesn’t particularly care for rodents,” the Dollmaker said. “You can give the mouse a crumb if you’d like, Rena. But I’m afraid he can’t bring along any friends. They’ll nibble at the rocking horses and the doll dresses, and then I’ll have to remake everything.”

Rena nodded and slid off her stool. She pinched one of the crumbs that had fallen from her bread between two fingers and went over to the mouse. Karolina thought the little creature would be frightened off by the tap, tap, tap of her red shoes, but it did not move as Rena set the crumb in front of it. “There you go, Mysz. You and I can have the exact same lunch.”

“Mysz?” said Karolina. “You’re going to name him Mysz?”

“Well, he is a mouse, isn’t he?” said Rena, watching Mysz turn the crumb over in his paws. “It would be silly to give him a person’s name.”

“I suppose so,” Karolina said. She had a person’s name, but then again, Karolina looked far more human than Mysz.

“I think it’s kind of you to feed him, Rena. I—” the Dollmaker began, but a resounding crash outside cut his comment short. The shelves rattled, spilling a few dolls and plush animals onto the floor. The rocking horses reared back, as if they were trying to flee from the source of the noise. And Mysz bolted back into his hole, taking his lunch with him.

“What was that?” Karolina cried.

“Nothing good,” the Dollmaker said. He grabbed his cane from where it rested against the table and staggered across the floor, collecting the fallen toys as he went. There were so many of them that his arms were overflowing by the time he reached the window. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

“What? What do you see?” asked Karolina.

But the Dollmaker did not answer. He shoved the toys onto the nearest shelf and went outside, letting the door slam closed behind him.

“Mr. Brzezick?” Rena called. She sprang off the floor and started after the Dollmaker.

“Don’t leave me behind!” Karolina said, waving her arms to remind Rena that she was stranded atop the worktable. The little girl doubled back and grabbed Karolina, clutching her against her chest as she followed the Dollmaker into the street.

At first, Karolina had no idea what had caused such a fuss. The only extraordinary thing she could see was the crowd growing in the spot where the towering statue of the poet Adam Mickiewicz stood. Or, she realized with horror, where the statue had stood.

Adam Mickiewicz was gone.

But the statue had not been spirited away—it had been torn down by force. Mr. Mickiewicz lay on the cobblestones; his head and one hand had been severed from his bronze body. A few ropes lay scattered around the base of the formerly grand monument. The German soldiers were admiring their handiwork.

The Dollmaker headed across the square, and he seemed too absorbed by the sight of the fallen statue to notice Rena or Karolina. His hand had tensed on the head of his cane, and his expression remained carefully blank, as if he too were a statue.

A smiling German private kicked Mr. Mickiewicz’s hand, passing it to his nearest comrade with a grunt. It was as if this—like the changing of the names—were all a delightful game. The Dollmaker drew back with a hiss.

“Barbarians,” he whispered. An old woman standing nearby gave him an approving nod, her mouth pinched as she turned back to the fallen statue. But as dreadful as it was, Karolina could not shake how the game reminded her of the way the children had played football in the square in the past.

All the soldiers here were boys, she thought, looking at their smooth faces. How could boys be so cruel?

Only one of the Germans, an officer, judging from the patches on his collar, had decided not to participate in the newly invented game. He looked a few years older than the other witches, and was tall and thin, with alabaster skin, and eyes the same piercing blue as Karolina’s. But that was the only thing she had in common with him. She stared as the officer snarled at the crowd and shouted, “Wracajcie do swoich domów! Go back to your homes!” His Polish was barely passable, and many of the people exchanged puzzled looks as they struggled to understand what he’d said. “Go home!” he repeated. “This is not your business. Go home, or you’ll be arrested!”

He waved his hand, and at last, people seemed to understand him. They scattered, grumbling and cursing the curt man and his fellow Germans as they went.

Rena looked from the Dollmaker, who was still clutching his cane very tightly, to the fragments of Adam Mickiewicz strewn on the ground. She bent down and picked up several of the pieces, showing them to the Dollmaker. “The statue’s not all gone, Mr. Brzezick. See?” Rena said.

The Dollmaker turned and said, “Rena! What are you doing? You shouldn’t be out here. There’s too much…” He seemed unable to describe the strange violence that had overtaken the square.

“You were so upset. Karolina and I wanted to see what was wrong,” Rena said. She adjusted Karolina’s red cap, which had fallen over one eye.

“I’m sorry,” the Dollmaker said, drawing Rena up against his side. “I should have told you where I was going. But I’m all right. There’s no need to worry.” He shivered a little, although the day was sweltering.

Karolina looked back across the main square. She had hoped that the witches would move elsewhere, but they seemed determined to stay near the toy shop. Even from a distance, Karolina could see their sides shaking with laughter.

The Dollmaker seemed to have noticed the group of witches as well. “Why don’t we go inside the church for a while?” he said to Rena, pointing to St. Mary’s Basilica with the tip of his cane.

Karolina was glad that the Dollmaker had made the suggestion. If he took Rena back to the shop, the Germans might see the blue star on Rena’s armband. And if they did, they would say terrible things about her—and maybe even hurt her.

“No one will mind that I’m there?” Rena said. “And Papa won’t mind?”

“You won’t get in trouble,” the Dollmaker said. “We’re not going to pray.” His hand tightened on Rena’s shoulder as he escorted her across the remainder of the square. He slipped on the cobblestones several times, but he never lost his footing. Still, Karolina was glad when they reached the church.

Once they were inside, the Dollmaker uncurled his hand from around his cane; the joints in his fingers cracked. Karolina said, “I don’t think bones are supposed to sound like that.”

“I’m just a little stiff these days,” said the Dollmaker. “That’s all.”

“Papa’s hands click like that now,” Rena said. “He says he’s fine too.”

The smile she received from the Dollmaker reminded Karolina of the wobbly smiles of the baby dolls in the shop, who always looked like they were about to burst into tears. But the Dollmaker did not cry; he turned his head toward the young priest who was holding Mass at the front of the church. The priest had lifted his hands up so that they appeared to be climbing toward heaven alongside the gilded saints depicted on the altarpiece. Karolina admired the fine details of the three wooden panels, which rose far above the heads of even the tallest men.

The Dollmaker dipped three fingers into the basin of water beside the door and crossed himself. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he murmured in prayer. “Amen.”

“Does it look like where you go to pray?” Karolina whispered to Rena.

“Not really,” said Rena, looking up. The ceiling formed a vault of blue and gold above them in an imitation of the summer sky. “We don’t have many paintings on the walls at our synagogue. But there’s lots of light and song. We can’t pray or celebrate there anymore, though. The Germans took it away. Papa says they put their guns in it now.”

It seemed ironic that the witches had made a place of peace and contemplation into a shrine to war. The thought made Karolina all the more bitter.

“I’m sorry you had to see what happened outside,” the Dollmaker said to Rena. “If I’d known they were going to destroy the statue…”

“That’s what I don’t understand—it was just a statue. Why did they hate it so much?” said Karolina. “People can’t use statutes and poems to fight with.”

“Adam Mickiewicz has always given us Poles hope. His poems make us rise up and fight—they have for a hundred years. That’s why the Germans want to get rid of any trace of him,” said the Dollmaker. “You can destroy a person, Karolina, but destroying their story is far more difficult. No one is ever really lost as long as their story still exists.”

Karolina thought about this and decided he was right. She held the stories of everyone she’d known in the Land of the Dolls inside her, even if they could no longer tell anyone those stories themselves. She might even carry the hidden tales of the Dollmaker’s mother.

“What will happen to all the pieces of Mr. Mickiewicz?” Rena asked.

“When the Germans are gone, we’ll rebuild the statue,” said the Dollmaker. “We must. Mickiewicz belongs to us—not them.”

“Never them,” Karolina said in agreement. “But we should be quiet—everyone else is praying.”

Suddenly she realized that was not quite true. The two people huddled in a nearby corner—a man and a boy about Rena’s age—appeared to have little interest in the priest’s sermon. The man was writing at a furious pace in a small leather book cradled against his chest. His hair was the color of the cherries the Dollmaker loved. And when he looked up from his notebook, Karolina saw that his eyes were as silver and round as coins.

She gasped, but the Dollmaker did not hear her. A choir had begun the day’s selection of hymns, and their voices swelled to fill every hollow within the church. Her friend had closed his eyes to enjoy the music—and, Karolina thought, to forget the sound of the statue falling.

Rena, however, did notice that Karolina’s gaze had been drawn to the whispering boy and the silver-eyed man. “Dawid?” she said.

“Who?” said Karolina.

“The boy is Dawid,” Rena said. “He lives in the flat downstairs with his mother and little sister. We used to walk home from school together back when there was a school.”

Karolina dimly recalled seeing Dawid the very first day she had met the Trzmiels. But the laughing boy who had raced into the parlor after Rena seemed a far cry from the Dawid he was now. He held himself stiffly, as though his own thoughts were almost too heavy for him to carry.

Karolina had been so engaged with the memory of Dawid that she was startled when Rena walked over to him. “Hello, Dawid,” she said quietly.

The boy whipped around, his eyes wide with fear. But that fear vanished as soon as he saw Rena. “Oh,” he said. “Hello, Rena.”

“What are you doing here?” Rena said.

The boy looked from Rena to the silver-eyed man, as if asking for permission. The man nodded, and Dawid said, “I was just…getting some medicine. Mama ran out of ration coupons, and my sister’s sick. So I came here.”

“I hope Danuta feels better. But why are you buying medicine in a church?” asked Rena. Karolina had wondered that herself.

Dawid shrugged. “Because the Germans don’t want us to have food or medicine, and this is the one place they don’t think we’ll ever go. People come here with the things we need, and we buy it from them,” he replied.

“That’s odd,” Rena said.

Dawid did not have the opportunity to respond. The Dollmaker had joined them—and he was already apologizing. “I’m very sorry if we interrupted any…transactions. Please don’t mind us,” he whispered to the silver-eyed man. The Dollmaker seemed to have known what was happening even without Dawid’s explanation.

“And I thought magicians were supposed to be clever and recognize magical things when they saw them,” said the man, sliding the notebook into his pocket with a snort. To Dawid, he said, “I’ll have what you need by tomorrow. And don’t worry about the money.”

“Thank you, sir.” Dawid bowed his head to the stranger and retreated toward the doors, but not without giving Rena a smile. “Bye,” he said, then dashed away before Rena could bid him farewell. This, thought Karolina, seemed to be a pattern with Dawid.

The Dollmaker, meanwhile, had finally cobbled together a response to the stranger’s accusation. “A magician? I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

But the silver-eyed man did not relent. “You’re the only magician in Kraków. Or even in all of Poland,” he said. He raised a slender white hand and placed two fingers beneath the Dollmaker’s chin, tilting it upward.

“You’ve mistaken me for someone else,” the Dollmaker said. He took a step back.

The silver-eyed man jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat. The fabric was glossy, making it look more like the pelt of an animal than velvet. “I can hear the heartbeat of the doll that little girl is holding, so let’s not pretend to be anything but what we are,” he said.

The Lakanica had been able to hear Karolina’s glass heart too. “And who are you?” Karolina snapped. Perhaps she shouldn’t have spoken, but what use was there in pretending to be an ordinary toy when Kraków seemed to be filling up with magic?

“You’d call me a story,” said the silver-eyed man.

“A story?” Rena asked. “What kind of story?”

“The kind everyone knows,” the silver-eyed man replied. He leaned forward. “The kind you’ve heard again and again. I used to be an outlaw from the countryside, but nowadays, it’s not greedy barons and margraves I’m stealing from—it’s the Germans.”

The Dollmaker let out a choked laugh. “You can’t honestly expect me to believe you’re Juraj Jánošík,” he said. “A Robin Hood figure who robs from the rich and gives to the poor—a fairy tale.”

“Juraj Jánošík? I read about him in one of the books you gave me,” Rena said. “I didn’t know he lived outside of the book, though.”

The Dollmaker said, “He doesn’t. There might have been such a person a long time ago, but he’s been dead for more than two hundred years.”

“No,” said Jánošík. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m a real man, who died and became a story. The more people tell a story, the more alive it becomes. And you’re one to talk, Dollmaker! Have you ever heard of a sillier thing than a living doll?”

“Karolina’s not silly!” Rena said. “She’s my friend.”

“Yes!” said Karolina. “It’s not my fault I’m so much smaller than everyone in this world.”

Jánošík chuckled. He did not seem bothered by his rudeness. He was a myth; Rena and Karolina must have looked small to him indeed. “My apologies. I was just trying to make a point to your friend,” he said. “We’re all in this together, and he’s wasting his talents. There’s a war happening, in case no one bothered to tell you.”

“I know that,” said the Dollmaker. A snarl chased his every syllable, as though he were speaking in the language of wolves rather than men. “I’m doing what I can.”

“You’ll have to do much more by the time all of this is over,” Jánošík said.

“Have you been spying on us?” said Karolina, wriggling in Rena’s arms. If she had been as big as the Dollmaker, she would have borne down on Jánošík like a hawk.

“Your friend is a magician, and most people are creatures of magic,” said Jánošík. “Of course people pay attention to him…and what he’s doing.” He moved his long fingers through the air, outlining the Dollmaker. He may have once been human, thought Karolina, but now his flesh was as white as the paper his story had been recorded on.

“What do you expect me to do to help? Join the resistance and blow up Germans? I promised myself a long time ago I would never hurt another man,” said the Dollmaker. His cane slipped from his hand, and he had to fumble for it so it didn’t clatter to the marble floor.

“There are other ways of fighting,” said Jánošík. “Look at me—I’m not fighting anyone with a fist or a blade.”

The Dollmaker snuck an anxious glance past Jánošík to Rena. “Then what do you suggest I do?” he asked.

“You have magic,” said Jánošík. “Use it. I use trickery every day. How else could I avoid being caught by the Germans?” His eyes glittered, as if he hoped the witches would try to catch him so he could mock them for their failure.

“You think I can control what I do,” said the Dollmaker. “But I can’t.”

“But you are a real magician,” said Rena, giving the Dollmaker’s coat a fierce tug. “We even met someone else who told me that you were. Didn’t we, Karolina?”

“We did,” Karolina said. She knew that she should have told the Dollmaker before, but what good would it have done? He wouldn’t have listened. He had no time to listen to the whispers of a meadow spirit.

“Who else thinks I can do magic?” the Dollmaker asked. He fixed Karolina and Rena with a disapproving look. It was a look Karolina supposed she deserved.

“It was a meadow spirit who ran away from the Germans,” Karolina said. “Rena and I talked to her that day you were in the park with Jozef.”

“See?” said Jánošík, clapping the Dollmaker on the shoulder. “The doll is right: you are a magician. Why, you might be able to bring the statue of Mr. Mickiewicz to life if you tried!”

“The Germans tore Mr. Mickiewicz down,” the Dollmaker said gloomily. “Or haven’t you been outside today?”

“They played football with the bits of him,” said Karolina, finding herself adopting the same melancholy tone as her friend.

“He’ll be back,” Jánošík said.

“That’s what the Dollmaker said,” Rena said, grinning.

Jánošík reached into his pocket, and Karolina thought he was about to remove the notebook he had been scribbling in when they’d entered the church. But the object he took from it was a small cloth sack roughly the size of his fist. “It’s sugar,” he said, and dropped it into the Dollmaker’s pocket. “Maybe you and Rena can have more than just bread tomorrow.”

“I…Thank you,” said the Dollmaker.

“Stay gentle. Be strong,” Jánošík said. Then he spoke to Karolina. “Stay with him. For as long as you can. It’s important that you stay with him.”

What was he talking about? Was this another cryptic warning, like the one the meadow spirit had given her? “Of course I will,” said Karolina. “I’ll take care of him too. It’s what I always do.”

“As well as you can,” said the thief.

“As well as I can,” Karolina said.

The sense that she had just made a solemn promise sent her heart rocking back and forth like the horses in the shop.

But Karolina knew it was a promise she’d needed to make.

That evening, after Rena had left the shop, the Dollmaker sat in silence for a long time. He lit a candle on his worktable, and Karolina sat near it, bathing in its glow.

At last the Dollmaker spoke, saying something Karolina never expected to hear. “I’m going to register as one of the Volksdeutsche,” he said. “I don’t want to be seen as a German, and I don’t need the extra rations, but we both know people who do.”

“We do,” Karolina agreed.

“But…” The Dollmaker sighed. “The Trzmiels would be punished if anyone found out. Severely punished—even more than I would be.”

“Then you can’t get caught,” said Karolina. She jerked her head toward the church, the only building in the square whose many windows were still lit. “Be clever like Jánošík.”

“They hanged Jánošík, you know,” the Dollmaker said thoughtfully. “In the end, they caught him and they hanged him. Yet somehow, he survived.”

“We’re magical. That means we’re very good at surviving,” said Karolina, feeling as if she was comforting both herself and the Dollmaker. She knew that by signing the list, the Dollmaker would forfeit his true name to the Germans. But Karolina thought he was far cleverer than they were; food was worth more than a name. Music, art, laughter—each of those gifts sprang from a full belly.

And who better to give those gifts to than Jozef and Rena?