A Clash of Kings — Bran III

Jojen tells Bran his green dream: the sea is coming over Winterfell's walls, and the drowned men in it have names Bran refuses to hear.

The chapter retold

Jojen tells Bran his green dream plainly, without softening it: the sea is coming over Winterfell’s walls, and the drowned men in the water have names Bran doesn’t want to hear. Bran, still learning to trust the strange Reed siblings, resists the vision the way anyone would resist a prophecy of their own home’s ruin — disbelief as a kind of self-protection.

The scene is the book’s clearest advance warning of the ironborn invasion still several chapters off, delivered with the maddening, oblique precision greendreams always carry in this story — true, specific, and useless for actually preventing what’s coming. Jojen’s gift becomes, from here forward, the reader’s early-warning system for Winterfell even as it remains almost entirely opaque to the boy it’s meant to protect.

This movement: Kings in Every Corner

• Stannis besieges Storm's End; the brothers parley with a peach between them and part as dead men.
• Catelyn watches a shadow with Stannis's face open Renly's throat inside his own pavilion.
• Tyrion trades princess Myrcella's hand to Dorne and ships Cersei's spies to the black cells.
• At Winterfell, Bran dreams with wolf's teeth; the Reeds of Greywater come to teach him what it means.