Faery Heroes

Chapter 15: Sand Falling through the Hourglass

Disclaimer: Did Harry risk expulsion and his soul to save Dudley? If so, I don't own the Harry Potter franchise; it belongs to J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Press, Warner Bros., and whoever else she sold the rights to.
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"All told, how much did the stuff from Dolohov's house make for us?" Harry asked the next week.

Hermione consulted the ledger she had filled with the various receipts. "Let's see... 100,000 pounds?"

"How much in real money?"

The brunette glared at Luna, who responded with a guileless smile. No matter how often they explained it to her, the blonde was not raised in the Muggle world and simply refused to consider anything but coins proper currency. Paper, she had told them, was for printing on, not buying things. "About 4,000 Galleons."

"Oh, that's not bad at all. More than many people earn in a year, certainly." She paused for a moment, then added, "Does that include the gold bars we made from his cell?"

As he had been in charge of that exchange, Harry answered. "No, the goblins refused to buy it all at once, something about 'foolish wizards trying to destroy the economy'. Still, they appraised it at a little more than 25,000." He smirked at their astounded faces. "It was about a hundred thirty-five kilograms of pure gold. Did you think we weren't going to make a killing off that?"

He should have received more for that much gold, but the greedy little beasts were notorious for undervaluing any precious metals wizards wanted to sell them. They considered all that was mined from the ground theirs, whether they had any hand in its extraction or not, which explained why they only 'lent' their smiths' creations to humans and had replaced the gold, silver, and bronze currency with lead and stone spelled to resemble the older coins. Normally he wouldn't have even considered using Gringotts to fence the bars they took from Dolohov, but they had been enchanted unbreakable, which prevented him from melting them down and selling them in the Muggle world. The fact that the goblins didn't care where he had procured them helped.

"On a related note, I discovered an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Dolohov didn't have any special security for his family's vault, just the key. The goblins charged a few excessive fees to get everything set up and move the contents around, but we now have our own private account with a starting balance of twenty grand, plus the deposits from the gradual sale of the gold." Laughing, he passed a bronze key to each stupefied girl.

"Wow, Harry," Hermione said. "Just... wow."

Luna was far more animated and hopped into his lap. "And you say you aren't as smart as we are. Silly man, we wouldn't have thought of doing that in a thousand years." She ran her hands through his hair and ground against him, making him groan. "Besides, hasn't anyone told you that using your brain makes you extra sexy?"

"You know, I don't think anyone's ever told me that."

"Well then, I guess I'll be the first." She moved in and kissed him, slowly but passionately. "Will you be my first again, too?"

Hermione cleared her throat, her face clearly showing her regret at what she was doing. "Can we leave that for later, please? My parents are going to be back soon, and I doubt they want to walk into a teenage threesome." With disappointed sighs, they settled down, though Luna refused to leave her new seat. "We did well, but there is always room for improvement. What did you two see that we need to fix before the next heist?"

"Power," he said. "I know we planned to wait for Luna's birthday since there was a really good core-enlargement ritual in one of our books, but until then, we'll need to either space our hits out or get a lot more skill quickly. After October we won't have a problem, but as it's only June..." He trailed off, wishing that they could resolve this issue earlier. There were a number of other rituals meant to raise efficiency of casting or the speed at which cores refilled, but the easiest way to increase the amount of magic available to a wizard was to force the core to grow. Unfortunately, that set of rituals all required the beneficiary to have an unmodified core, so they had to be very selective about which they performed. The one in question used the sacrifice of a witch's virginity as the 'offering', an element common to almost all rituals that necessary to charge it and affect the change, hence the delay.