Hermione spent the whole of Sunday in the library, and when she came up to the Room after dinner, she had four books under her arm and looked annoyed with every one of them.
"There's nothing," she said, dropping them on the table. "Hardly anything, anyway. I've read everything Madam Pince has on Gringotts, and it's all goblin rebellions and how much interest you get on a vault. Nobody's written down one useful thing about how it's protected."
"The goblins probably don't let them," I said.
"That's what this one says." She tapped the top book. "Apparently a wizard tried to publish a map of the lower levels about two hundred years ago, and his own vault was empty by the end of the week. Nobody could ever prove it was them."
"Fair enough, really." If I'd built the most secure bank in Britain, I wouldn't want some wizard drawing maps of it either.
She sat down across from me. Behind her, the blackboard still had the ring's box ticked and the cup's box empty, with GRINGOTTS (HARD) next to it in her neat capitals, underlined twice.
"What do you actually know?" she asked. "About the vault."
"Voldemort gave the cup to Bellatrix Lestrange to look after," I explained. "That's in his memories. She put it in the family vault, and the Lestranges are an old family, so it'll be one of the deep ones. And Hagrid told me in first year that the high-security vaults have dragons guarding them."
"Dragons?" Hermione said.
"That's what he said."
"Underground? In the dark? That's horrible. Dragons need room to fly. Charlie's got half a mountain range for his."
"Hagrid made it sound brilliant," I said. "Then again, Hagrid once kept one in a wooden hut."
She pulled the top book back towards her and frowned at the cover, as if it should have mentioned the dragons.
"It's still someone else's vault," she said. "I know the Lestranges are awful. But we'd be breaking into Gringotts and taking something out of a vault that isn't ours, and that's stealing, Harry."
"It's not theirs either," I said. "The cup belonged to a witch called Hepzibah Smith. Voldemort was working at Borgin and Burkes after he left school, and she showed it to him. Two days later she was dead, and the cup was gone."
"So it's already stolen," Hermione said. "Then we give it back afterwards. Not to the Smiths, they'd want to know where it came from. To Hufflepuff. The same as the diadem."
I nodded at her hair. "The diadem's still in there, though."
Her hand went to the blue clip. "I'm borrowing it."
"Good. Keep borrowing it," I said. "It suits you."
"It's a long-term loan," said Hermione, going a bit pink, and pulled a fresh roll of parchment over. "So how do we get in?"
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "I can feel which way the cup is, but I can't feel anything protecting it from all the way up here. I need to go and stand in the bank for a bit."
She looked up from the parchment. "You want to go and stand in Gringotts."
"Under the Cloak. Half an hour, maybe. Then I'll know what we're dealing with."
Two fourth-years and one Invisibility Cloak, off to scout out the most secure bank in Britain.
It sounded like the script for a Spy Kids sequel.
"There's still more than a week of the holidays left," Hermione said. "That's why you want to go now."
"It's the only time nobody's going to notice someone's gone for a morning. I was thinking Tuesday."
"Two someones," she said. "You were going to go on your own."
"I wasn't." I'd only thought about it a little bit.
"You were thinking about it." She dipped her quill. "If you're going somewhere stupid and dangerous, I'm going too. That's how this works, remember?"
"It's a bank lobby," I told her. "It's not even a bit dangerous."
"Then it won't matter if I come along," said Hermione.
On Tuesday, straight after breakfast, we set off. Ron asked where we were going, and when I said the library, he just nodded, because as far as Ron was concerned that was where Hermione went every day of her life and I'd been getting dragged along since Christmas.
We'd both changed into Muggle clothes first, in case we needed to take the Cloak off somewhere Muggles could see us.
I got the Cloak round both of us in an empty corridor on the third floor, took her hand, and brought us out in the little yard behind the Leaky Cauldron.
It was just as damp and grotty as the original Harry remembered from the day Hagrid had first brought him here.
We waited behind the bins for about five minutes, breathing in old chip fat.
"You know," Hermione whispered, grinning up at me, "our dates used to be Butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks. Now it's a falling-down shack with a dead snake on the door on Saturday, and the bins behind a pub today."
"I'm keeping things varied," I whispered back. "Next time we're in Hogsmeade, it's Butterbeer again. I'll even check it for bits of soul first."
She leaned into my side under the Cloak. "I wasn't complaining."
"It sounded a bit like complaining."
"It wasn't." Her fingers moved in mine, lacing through properly. "You could have done all of this on your own, you know. You keep bringing me anyway."
I'd never really thought of it as bringing her. Somewhere in the last few months, I'd just stopped wanting to do things without her there, and it was a bit of a strange thing to work out while standing next to a bin.
I squeezed her hand. She bumped her shoulder against mine, and that was when the pub's back door opened. A wizard in a purple hat came out and tapped the bricks with his wand, and we followed him through the archway before it closed.
"I feel like a burglar," Hermione said under her breath.
"We're just looking," I whispered back. "The burgling comes later."
Diagon Alley was quieter than I'd ever seen it. Without the summer crowds buying school things, it was mostly old witches doing their shopping and a couple of boys with their noses pressed to the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies.
Gringotts stood at the far end, white and much taller than everything around it.
We went up the steps right behind an old witch with a shopping basket. The goblin at the bronze doors bowed her through, and we slipped in after her.
Just inside was a second pair of doors, silver ones, with the poem engraved on them about what happens to people who come to Gringotts to steal.
Hermione read it under her breath and squeezed my hand tight.
The hall beyond was long and marble, with goblins on high stools all along the counters, weighing coins and gems on little brass scales.
The goblin nearest us was weighing a ruby the size of a hen's egg and frowning at it like it owed him money. Everyone else in the hall had come in to put gold in or take some out.
We'd come to work out how to rob the place.
I'd left the Infinity down for this. I had no idea what goblin wards would make of it, and the middle of their bank wasn't the place to find out the hard way.
We found a spot behind a pillar near the back, out of everyone's way, and I let my senses go out properly.
The whole building was thick with magic, and most of it was nothing like ours. Wizard spells have a shape I can follow, even old nasty ones like the curses on the Gaunt house.
Goblin magic was put together differently, and for the first few minutes I couldn't tell what most of it was for.
So I stopped trying to work it all out at once and just paid attention, which was how I'd picked up elf magic from Dobby in the first place.
Some of it was simple enough. There was an anti-Apparition ward over the whole bank, a strong one, built to stop wizards.
It felt a lot like the one at Hogwarts, and I was fairly sure elf magic would get through it the same way.
The second layer was the interesting one. It started below the hall and covered the deep levels, which went a lot further than the bank itself did, out under Diagon Alley and a long way past it.
As far as I could tell, all it did was notice. Anything that turned up down there without coming through the carts, it would know about straight away, and I didn't fancy finding out what the goblins sent after you when it did.
Every time one of the doors at the back opened, I could feel a cart rattle up to it from somewhere below, and every cart had the same little knot of goblin magic built into it.
I spent a long time on that knot, because I had a feeling it was the answer. Under all of it, the cup's thread went almost straight down, a very long way.
I knew more about the bottom of Gringotts than I could ever explain to Hermione: the waterfall on the tracks that washed off disguises, and the curses in the Lestrange vault that made everything you touched burn and multiply.
In the books, Griphook had said those curses were added, so I didn't know if they'd be there yet. None of it could be felt from up here, so I'd plan as if they were and be pleasantly surprised if they weren't.
About ten minutes in, a wizard in a hurry cut round the pillar and nearly walked straight into us.
I pulled us both back against the stone just in time, and he went past close enough to brush the edge of the Cloak.
After that we stayed flat against the pillar, squashed together under the Cloak, with her hair tickling my chin.
Her free hand had ended up bunched in the back of my jumper, and every time a goblin walked past us she held her breath until his footsteps had gone.
I was supposed to be concentrating on goblin wards, and I mostly was. It was just hard not to notice how tightly she was holding on, and how much I liked being the person she held on to.
"What does it feel like?" she breathed, close to my ear.
"Pretty nice, actually," I whispered. "You can hold on like that whenever you want."
She hid her face against my shoulder for a second, though her hand stayed exactly where it was. "The wards, Harry," she mumbled.
"Oh, those." I tipped my head back. "Clever. They've had a long time to get it right."
She shifted against me. "Can you get past them?"
"Probably. There's one bit I want a proper look at first." Another cart was rattling up from below, knot and all. "I'll tell you outside."
She waited while the cart stopped and a red-faced wizard climbed out of it, still counting his Galleons. Then she said, even more quietly, "What would have happened if that man had walked into us?"
"He'd have apologised to a pillar," I said. "Then I'd have had us out of here before any of the goblins got off their stools."
"You'd have Apparated out of the middle of Gringotts."
"Elf-Apparated. That gets through." I checked the ward over our heads again. "Probably."
"Probably," she repeated, and her grip on my jumper got tighter.
When I'd seen enough, we slipped out behind a young wizard with a bag of money and walked back up the street to the Leaky Cauldron.
Tom was polishing a glass behind the bar and didn't look up. Out on Charing Cross Road, I found a doorway nobody was looking at and took the Cloak off.
The Muggle street was loud after Diagon Alley, and a bus nearly took my foot off at the first crossing, which would have been a pretty embarrassing way for the Boy Who Lived to go.
Nobody else paid us any attention. We were just two teenagers in jeans.
Hermione got about ten steps before she stopped outside an enormous bookshop.
"Can we?" she asked.
"We've just scouted out Gringotts," I said, "and you want to go to a bookshop?"
"It's a very good bookshop," she said, already halfway through the door.
It was. We were in there for an hour. Hermione spent most of it in the puzzles section, looking for a book her dad didn't already have, which took a while, because apparently he had nearly all of them.
She found one in the end and paid for it with a ten-pound note from the bottom of her bag.
I didn't know what my own dad had liked, the one from before I woke up as Harry.
I didn't know if he'd done crosswords, or if there was a shop somewhere I'd have spent an hour in, hunting for something he didn't already have. That whole part of my life was just gone, and most of the time I didn't think about it.
I thought about it a bit in that bookshop, watching Hermione go along the shelves for her dad.
After that, I bought us both hot chocolate in a café round the corner. I'd brought some Muggle money with me, in case we ended up somewhere like this.
She waited until I was halfway through mine before she put her cup down.
"About Professor Dumbledore," she said.
I held up three fingers. "Three days."
"What?"
"I bet myself you'd bring it up again within three days," I explained. "You've cut it a bit fine."
"You bet on me?"
"Only with myself. Nobody lost any money."
She leaned across the table. "I'm serious, Harry. Gringotts isn't a shack in the middle of a wood. If something goes wrong in there, it's not just us any more, and Professor Dumbledore finds out anyway, from the front page of the Daily Prophet."
"Nothing's going to go wrong," I said.
"You don't know that." She'd picked a sugar packet out of the bowl and was folding it into smaller and smaller squares. "I keep thinking about Saturday. I had my hand right over that ring, and I didn't even know I was doing it. If you hadn't been watching my hands, I'd have picked it up." She put the sugar packet down. "And that was a falling-down house with a dead snake on the door. This is Gringotts."
On the stile she'd eaten her sandwich and joked about staying three feet back, and I'd let myself think that meant she was fine about it. She wasn't, not completely, and she'd been carrying it around for three days without saying anything.
I reached across the table and put my hand over hers, sugar packet and all.
"I was watching, though," I said. "I'll be watching at Gringotts too."
She turned her hand over under mine and held on.
I'd been thinking about telling him ever since the stile. Dumbledore was the greatest wizard of modern times, at least according to his Chocolate Frog card, and in the books he'd spent years hunting Horcruxes. He was the obvious person to go to.
The problem was how he worked. He always had his own plan, and he never told anyone what it was.
He just set things up so people ended up doing what he wanted, and the original Harry had been steered like that for seven books. If I told him now, this would turn into one of his plans.
"I've just stood in the bank for half an hour. I know a lot more than I did this morning." I turned my cup round on the table.
"If I go to him now, he'll tell me to leave Gringotts alone and let him deal with it. He'd have his own plan for it, and it'd probably take him a year. I can do it in one night."
Hermione wrapped both hands round her mug.
"I'd tell you to leave it alone too, if I were him," she said.
I grinned at her. "You tell me that anyway."
"And you never listen." She blew on her drink. "Fine. But if anything goes wrong in there, anything at all, we go straight to his office afterwards. Both of us."
"Deal," I said.
"And after the cup, we talk about it again," she said. "Properly. Not 'we'll talk about it.'"
"We'll talk about it properly," I said.
When we'd finished, I took us home from the same doorway where I'd taken the Cloak off.
Term started again on Monday, and Hermione's revision timetable came out the same night.
It was colour-coded by subject and stuck to the inside of her Arithmancy book, and it went all the way up to the exams in June.
There was even a slot for History of Magic, so Hermione got to read about goblin rebellions all over again, this time from her own notes on Binns's lessons, which were somehow even more boring than the library books.
I didn't need one. The champions were excused from the end-of-year exams, which was easily the best thing the Goblet of Fire had ever done for me.
"It's not fair," Hermione said, watching me read a book about goblin metalwork for fun.
I turned a page. "I've got the third task in June."
"You'll finish it in ten minutes, whatever it is."
"Probably less," I agreed.
The diadem made the timetable a bit pointless, though. By Thursday evening she'd revised the entire year, two months before the exams, and when I found her in the Room she had nothing in front of her for the first time since I'd known her.
"I don't know what to do with myself," she said.
"Revise it again?" I suggested.
"I know it already. I tested myself. Twice." She glared at the timetable. "Ron asked to borrow my notes, and I said no. I don't even need them any more."
"You could help me with the ward," I offered.
She sat up straight away.
I'd spent every evening since we got back from London building a copy of the noticing ward in the corner of the Room.
With the Archmage Essence, I remembered every bit of what I'd felt in the bank, so it was more a case of putting it together than guessing.
Mine only covered one corner of the Room instead of half of London, but it noticed things the same way, and I'd made it chime whenever it did so we'd both know.
"You can't learn goblin magic by standing in a lobby for half an hour," Hermione said, looking at the patch of floor where I'd told her it was.
I shrugged. "I learned elf magic by watching Dobby twice."
"That isn't as reassuring as you think it is."
I blinked from the door straight into the middle of it.
The chime went off like a school bell, loud enough that Hermione jumped.
I stepped back out of it. "So that's what happens if I just turn up in the vault. Every goblin in the building knows within about a second."
"And the carts?" she asked.
I'd told her about the knot over hot chocolate. "The ward leaves the carts alone. So if I wrap a copy of the cart's magic round us, it should think we're a cart."
I copied the knot from memory, wrapped it round myself, went back to the door and blinked into the middle of the ward again. This time it didn't make a sound.
Hermione walked all the way round me, squinting at the air, before she stuck her own hand into the ward without the knot. It chimed at her.
"It works," she said.
"Told you."
"And when the goblins look in the vault, and the cup's gone?" she asked.
"We leave a copy," I said. "Same weight, same look, and nobody ever finds out it was missing."
"Like Regulus did," Hermione said.
"Hopefully with fewer Inferi."
If the burning and copying curses were already on the vault, nobody was touching anything until I'd taken them off, the same as I had with the traps at the Gaunt house.
After that, the thread would take me straight to the cup, and the fake could go where the real one had been.
Hermione went over to the blackboard and stood in front of the cup's box with the chalk in her hand. "Saturday?"
"Saturday night," I said. "The bank's closed, so there'll be fewer goblins anywhere near the deep vaults."
"It needs a name," she said.
I stepped out of the ward. "You want to name it?"
"You're going to name it anyway. I'd rather it wasn't something awful this time."
"Operation Goblin Heist," I said.
"Anyone who overheard that would know exactly what we were doing." She tapped the chalk against her chin, looking at the cup's box. "It should be about the cup without saying cup. Hufflepuff's animal is a badger."
I tried again. "Operation Badger, then."
"That's a bit plain." She thought for a second and snapped her fingers. "Honey badger. They break into beehives to steal the honey. The bees sting them, and they just don't care. I did a project on them in primary school."
Operation Honey Badger. I'd have been proud of that one myself.
Back in January, she'd turned down every name I came up with, and now she was naming operations herself. She was stealing all my best qualities. Next she'd be tripping Snape into cauldrons.
"That's really good," I admitted.
"I know," she said, but she was humming as she wrote OPERATION HONEY BADGER above the cup's box, in letters about twice the size of anything else on the board.
When she'd finished, she drew a little badger next to it, baring its teeth at the word GRINGOTTS.
I decided I should tell her that her ideas were good more often.
*
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