- Ella wakes up early, puts on her mom's necklace under a gown, and steals a few scones for breakfast. Delicious. She'd wanted to get an early start to say goodbye to her favorite places before being shipped off to boarding school.
- She runs into her father (literally, of course), who tells her he doesn't have time for her, so go bang into someone else.
- Magically compelled to do exactly that (thanks again, Lucinda), Ella bumps into Bertha the maid, then has breakfast with Mandy.
- Ella goes to the royal menagerie, outside the king's walls. She visits a little dragon in a cage and some centaurs on an island.
- Prince Charmont is there, also viewing the centaurs (they had human upper halves and horse legs, but lack human intelligence). He gives an apple to Ella to give to a centaur, who eats it.
- Ella makes Char laugh by imitating a centaur in order to get him to give her an apple too. Which is… kind of creepy? Anyway, it works, because Char declares that he likes her.
- Next, they visit the parrots. The parrots speak both human and magical tongues: Gnomic, Elfian, Ogrese, and Abdegi (the language the giants speak).
- Ella's got a gift for languages, so she repeats phrases that they say in Gnomic. The Gnomic phrases look pretty funny on the printed page, and gauging by Char's difficulty in pronouncing them properly when he tries to imitate Ella, they sound funny too.
- She says goodbye to the parrots in all of the languages she knows, and bids farewell to the bird keeper, Simon, too.
- They go around to the ogre hut, which is guarded constantly. Ogres are apparently super-dangerous: they can know your secrets just by looking at you, and can speak so persuasively that you decide to not only befriend them but also offer yourself up as dinner (yum). Think Tolkienesque orcs but even creepier; or Shrek, but even less jovial.
- But what's this? They hear a voice near the ogre hut that doesn't sound like an ogre. Turns out a gnome baby got lost and is in dire danger of becoming an ogre snack.
- Char picks up the squirmy little dude, and Ella offers to hold him and talk to him in Gnomic to calm him down.
- Meanwhile, the ogre cracks up when he looks at Ella. We don't get a translation of what he says in Ogrese, but it seems like he realizes what her deal is and finds it hilarious.
- In Kyrrian (the common tongue), the ogre tells Ella to bring him the gnome baby.
- The ogre doesn't even bother to use his persuasive voice, but Ella still has to do it. She manages to resists the order briefly because there's another life at stake, but her legs give in and she begins walking toward the ogre, i.e. certain death.