I came across your page during a week long endeavor to find the title to a book I read back in the early 2000s. I’ve been wracking my brain and it’s killing me. I will include all that I remember below. I’m pretty sure it could have been an older book and I think it had a mauve/dusty pink paperback cover.
So here’s what I remember: It starts out in a castle with a girl who I think is maybe a princess. She’s a tomboy. I remember they have a big grey dog that she loves. Her parents go missing while she’s asleep and then her nurse maid comes to tell her to get out of the castle and hide. Then she gets chased by someone, presumably trying to kill her. She runs upstairs past a abandoned passage in the castle and hides in a closet of sorts and hears two voices trying to find her and kill her. She ends up escaping somehow and wanders through the woods and ends up coming across some woodsman (kind of 7 dwarves vibes) and they take her in. I’m pretty sure she’s with them for a while through the winter.
One day she gets taken by some robbers or spies and they knock her out and bring her with them. She wakes up by a fire in the woods with the people around the fire. She sees one of them (an ugly old lady) sharpening a dagger made of ice and she finds out that the ice is mixed with poison so that it melts slower. She ends up getting stabbed I her back with the ice and from there she gets really feverish and blurry as the poison takes effect. Obviously she ends up okay at some point and I think she ends up reunited with her mom but that’s about all I remember
Anything helps and thank you so much in advance!
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: Name That Book! 