Margaret Ball and Anne McCaffrey: Acorna's Quest

Found as an infant drifting alone in an escape pod in deep space, Acorna was raised by three mining prospectors who protected her from "authorities" who wanted to surgically correct what they saw as her "deformities" - her oddly shaped feet and the small golden horn in the center of her forehead. When they hid out on the bandit planet Kezdet, Acorna turned the economy upside down by freeing the enslaved child laborers and creating group homes for them on Kezdet's moons where they could work and study. She earned many friends -- and a few dedicated enemies.

Now Acorna has become a young woman, with all of youth's dreams and sorrows. (In an alternate reading: she's got a raging case of teenage-itis.) She yearns for answers to the secrets of her past: Who taught her the alien language she had all but forgotten? Why was she left alone, drifting in a tiny escape pod? And most of all - where are there others of her own kind?