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The mother of the girl that the village will later call Healthy-Orphan does not mark the day or really the year of her last daughter's birth. It isn't the sort of village that can afford calendars.
The seasons turn four times from there, and the girl's mother is dead. The orphan doesn't particularly have a father that she knows of--her mother volunteered no such information before death took any answers that might've been--so she goes to her mother's sister.
She lives and thrives, through further turnings of the seasons, which is unusual for an orphan; she has good teeth and a face unscarred by any waves of plague. They call her Healthy-Orphan, then, which is not too much of an awkward construction in their language; opalin-milyer it would be there.
Orphan's village does not consider itself to be poor. They consider themselves to be orderly, custom-abiding people, who can afford the sort of luxuries that are proper to their station. This doesn't include anyone learning to read; it does include waiting until girls look old enough to have a chance at surviving pregnancy before they're fair game, even if their skin is unusually fair and their forms unusually healthy. So nobody is really bothering to count the seasons, as such, but the seasons turn several times from Orphan's first blood to when she's sold. It really is a very civilized village, as such places go.
The first time Orphan feels strongly enough about anything for her sorcery to wake up inside her, to rip free of her, the dark fire's first act is to shred the man who bought and married her.
