Snowbound at the Cathedral School
A Medieval Campus Novel in One Winter Day

About this book:

When a savage Alpine storm buries the cathedral school of Saint-Maurice-en-Haut under forty feet of snow, the death of Master Anselm—scholar, scribe, and keeper of the school's most dangerous secrets—ignites a silent war in the frozen cloisters. His final manuscript, a blistering refutation of a rival university's theology, lies unfinished on his desk, its last words frozen mid-stroke in violet ink: *Do not give to the Chancellor unless—* Unless what? The nib broke. The Master's keys are gone. And somewhere in the scriptorium, a second text hides beneath the Gospel—a ledger of stolen silver written in the vernacular of charcoal-burners, not the Latin of doctors.

Brother Luke, a young scribe with a wheelwright's hands and a heretic's curiosity, watches the masters circle the corpse like wolves: the Chancellor, smooth and ruthless; the Vice-Regent, desperate for preferment; the Rhetorician, loud and venal. Trapped in a stone maze where the ink freezes in the horn and the choir sings *Te Deum* through blue lips, Luke holds the one thing they cannot seize—a scrap of vellum palmed from the dead man's charcoal tub, bearing four names and a numeral that matches no scripture. As avalanches thunder against the mountain and the food runs out, the school becomes a pressure cooker where theology is currency, manuscripts are weapons, and the next master will be decided not by election, but by who survives the thaw.

*Snowbound at the Cathedral School* is *The Name of the Rose* meets *The Secret History*: a locked-room mystery wrapped in a siege novel, steeped in the grit of medieval scholarship—gall-nuts and lampblack, disputed glosses and frozen porridge, the smell of vinegar and vellum. One winter day. One dead master. One manuscript worth killing for. The snow is rising. The ink is freezing. Read the margin before the Chancellor burns it.