Acorna

A silver-horned child drifts alone in an escape pod, and three grizzled asteroid miners haul her aboard, not yet knowing they have adopted a legend. She grows fast, this foundling: her horn purifies foul water, coaxes life from dead soil, and lays a healing touch on the sick and the sorrowing. She is Acorna, and somewhere among the stars a gentle, telepathic people mourn the daughter they lost. This is McCaffrey country — spacefaring adventure with a fairy tale's heart, warm where much science fiction is cold. The first arc runs across seven books, from Acorna: The Unicorn Girl through Acorna's Triumph, written by Anne McCaffrey with Margaret Ball and then Elizabeth Ann Scarborough: a foundling's search for her own kind, the Linyaari, threaded through a hard fight to free enslaved children on the mining world of Kezdet. A second sequence, Acorna's Children, passes the horn to the next generation and the daughter who inherits both the gift and the danger. What lingers is the tenderness — a heroine whose power is to mend rather than destroy, and whose enemies are cruelty and greed rather than mere monsters. Begin at the beginning, with The Unicorn Girl; the story is one long braid, and publication order is the way in.