title: Knife Maker
author: Kuhnke, Jean L.
description: Rowena was an infant when her mother was brutally killed, because of her extraordinary beauty, by unscrupulous enforcers of a new regime.  She was too young and innocent to understand why her father deliberately applied a stain to her face camouflaging her remarkable good looks.  By the time she realized the blemish on her face, which caused all kinds of ridicule and harassment, was not permanent, she also understood the need to keep applying the stain.
  The young girl spent her entire pre-adult life working with her father in the forge producing fighting weapons for both the enforcers and secretly for the resistance.  When her father was killed, Rowena hid in a cave making weapons for the resistance until it became too dangerous for the girl, now posing as a boy.
  Her real life began when she was carried away on a ship to the Americas.  At barely twenty, she was put in charge of a spoiled debutante that narrowly escaped the attentions of the enforcers.  The trials of hiding in a cave for over a year were replaced by sharing space with a seventeen-year-old selfish spoiled girl.
  Getting Leena safely to Boston would free Rowena to pursue her own life in the new country and hopefully support herself by making kitchen knives.