What seemed to her like yesterday, it had happended long ago. Medair an Rynstar has finally obtained the weapon to fight back the invaders. How to survive this last distance? It was too much like coming home. Aware of the gaze of fellow travellers and palace guards alike, she clenched jaw and hands and willed a blankness to her mind. She took a harsh breath, like a swimmer coming up for air, and her chestnut tossed his head, for her grip on the reins was too tight. Her face was as pale and weary as the stone which mocked her loyalties and the company she kept. Five hundred years too late, Medair an Rynstar finally crossed into the fastness of the White Palace. To make the right choices.I loved Medair, and her bigger-on-the-inside satchel, and the writing - the writing hooked me in, even before I knew what Medair's circumstances were. To try to be fair, to try to set aside old prejudices - even as she recognises that this, too, will be an on-going process, something she will perhaps always struggle with. She doesn't know what it means to be Medair an Rynstar in this new world.And yet, she's determined to try. She cannot forget the past she doesn't know how to untangle the world she knew from the world she is now in she doesn't know where her loyalties should lie or what the right thing to do so. The Silence of Medair begins a few months after Medair awakes from her impossibly long nap, so the initial shock and grief have faded to something she can - mostly - keep safely hidden.I like that Medair has taken time to grieve - but also that this is an on-going process. Those she considers invaders are now part of the empire and are certainly not to blame for the actions of their ancestors.And there's no one she trusts to tell her secrets.

The world, the job she, and the people she cared about are all long gone. They're forced into exile by circumstances, grieving for what they have lost and, because they cannot go home, are stuck with people they do not know.Medair an Rynstar has woken to discover that 500 years have passed. Host is very good at putting her characters in situations that I find absolutely gripping.

Medair by Andrea K. Höst