Meera Reed

Jojen's elder sister, a fierce and capable young crannogwoman handy with net and frog-spear, sworn to see her brother's visions through.

The fuller tale

Meera is the practical half of the strangest sibling act in the North. Sixteen when the tale finds her, eldest child of Howland Reed of Greywater Watch, she is a crannogwoman to the bone: raised on a floating castle in the swamps of the Neck, armed with the fen-fighter's kit the open-field knights sneer at — a three-pronged frog spear and a woven net — and entirely done being condescended to about either. The books introduce her laughing; nearly everything after gives her less and less to laugh about, and she manages it anyway, which is rather the point of her.

Where Jojen supplies the party's prophecy, Meera supplies everything else: food, watches, route-craft, morale, and the daily unglamorous labor of keeping three boys — one crippled, one simple, one fading — alive across the frozen North and beyond the Wall. The tale is deliberate about the division: her brother knows things and her prince sees things, but it is Meera's hands that catch the fish, kill the wights and haul the sled. At Harrenhal's tourney it was her father a mystery knight defended; a generation on, the daughter does her house's work the same way — unheralded, decisive, and gone from the field before the songs start.

Her hardest labors come at the end of the road. It is Meera who fights at the cave mouth while her brother's strength fails, Meera who drags Bran's sled alone through the dark with the dead behind her, and Meera who speaks the three words that echo backward through a stableboy's whole life. When she finally delivers Bran home to Winterfell — the entire quest accomplished, at the cost of nearly everyone who began it — the boy she saved has become something that thanks her like a filing clerk. Her walk out of the story, hurt and unthanked, is the tale's most pointed invoice for what the great destinies cost the people who carry them.

The page and the screen

Book Meera is still in the greenseer's cave, brother beside her, her story paused mid-journey; everything the show gave her after — the escape, Hodor's door, the long haul south, the cold farewell from a transfigured Bran — is unwritten on the page. The books braid her deeper into the backstory instead: the Knight of the Laughing Tree tale she tells Bran stars her own father at Harrenhal, and fandom has long noted that Howland Reed is the sole living witness of the tower of joy — making the Reed children, in some theories, keepers of secrets even they may not know they hold. The show quietly dropped every strand of that, along with a fan-favorite theory or two about Meera's own parentage that the books have never dignified with confirmation.

Where they stand, season by season

Mentioned in the chronicle

• Bran meets Jojen and Meera Reed, and learns the word for what he is: warg. (S3·E2)

Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.

The chronicle records no death for this soul — they are living when the tale leaves them, or their ending is a page the maesters have yet to turn.