Angol
I loved you every day I was afraid of you.
In the queen's house at Ishmael, Abish bakes the bread, and every morning she wipes a sign from the crust before anyone can see. Her father taught her the sign. On his last night before the king's men came, he closed her hand over a disk of clay. The sign was on one face, and the names of the believers on the other. Then he gave her his rule. Keep the names. Never say them. Now a soft-spoken man who keeps the order of the house is hunting the keeper of those names, and the gate guard she refused long ago has questions of his own. Then a Nephite is brought bound before the king, a flock is saved at Sebus, and the king falls as though dead. When the queen and the household fall beside him, one servant is left standing, and she has to choose.
The record gives Abish one passage in Alma 19. This is the life around the passage: the silence, the bread, the hunt, and the run through the city in the light. Then come the hard years after, when a people who have given up the sword kneel rather than fight, and someone has to say the names of the dead aloud.
Book 8 of The Buried and the Kept: a servant with a clay disk at her breast, the quiet man hunting the keeper, and a gate guard who has waited long enough for an answer.
