What point of view characters will show up in The Winds of Winter?

We don’t know when The Winds of Winter, the sixth installment in George R.R. Martin’s long-running A Song of Ice and Fire series, will come out. However, we do know several things about it, including many of the point-of-view characters who will be included. Over the past few years, Martin has shared several sample chapters with readers, whether by posting them on his website, including them in the backs of other books, or reading them aloud at cons. And there are others the existence of which he’s implied.

So through whose eyes will we see the story unfold? Let’s run down the list.

• Arianne Martell: The only daughter of Doran Martell may have been cut from the show, but she’s still going strong in the novels. You can read one of her chapters right now on Martin’s website.
• Theon Greyjoy: This sample chapter picks up right where we left off in A Dance with Dragons, with Theon having jumped off the ramparts of Winterfell and into Stannis’ camp. It was first posted on Martin’s website way back in December of 2011. It’s archived to read online.
• Mercy: AKA Arya Stark. This was another chapter that first appeared on Martin’s website. It’s also archived online.
• Alayne: AKA Sansa Stark. Same deal as above: it went up on Martin’s website, and you can still read it.
• The Forsaken: That’s the unfortunate name given to Aeron Greyjoy, who’s rather down on his luck in this chapter. Martin read it at a convention last year, and you can read it here.
• Victarion Greyjoy: This is another character cut from the novels. Martin has read an excerpt from this chapter at various fan conventions. Redditor icedune21 transcribed it.
• Tyrion Lannister: There are two Tyrion chapters out there. You can read one of them on the World of Ice and Fire mobile app, available on Android and iOS.
• Barristan Selmy: There are at least two chapters from the perspective of Barristan the Bold in The Winds of Winter. You can read one of them in a 2013 edition of A Dance with Dragons.
• Asha Grejoy: When Martin posted a picture of himself at his computer a while back, Reddit zoomed in on the screen and discovered he was writing an Asha chapter.
• Areo Hotah: Martin said that “Areo Hotah will continue as a POV” on his Not a Blog.
• Cersei Lannister: Martin was writing a chapter from her perspective before heading to Balticon in 2016.
• Melisandre: While at the Guadalajara International Book Fair late last year, Martin was asked whether the city of Asshai would show up in The Winds of Winter. “I don’t plan to set any scenes in Asshai, at least not in the present book,” he said. However, he did point out that Melisandre is from that city, that she’s a viewpoint character, and that she might “think back on some of her time in Asshai.” Click here to see out full coverage of that event — he dropped quite a few interesting sound bites in addition to the Melisandre thing.

ASOIAF luminary BryndenBFish recently dug into all of this on Reddit. He pointed out that not only are the above point-of-view characters confirmed, but that there are several others who are pretty much guaranteed to show up:

• Bran Stark: “Any chance that we will see bran in winds?” a fan asked Martin on Not a Blog. “Yes,” Martin replied. It’s possible that Bran will only show up as a character in someone else’s chapter, but since Martin confirmed that the whole “Hold the Door” incident was his idea to start with, it’s likely there’ll be a version of it in Winds, and that it’ll be told from Bran’s perspective.
• Deanerys Targaryen: Remember when Khal Drogo tore the throat out of that Dothraki dude in season 1? That guy’s name was Mago, and according to an interview Martin gave to Entertainment Weekly in 2011, he’ll be a recurring character in The Winds of Winter. Odds are he’ll be recurring throughout Daenerys’ chapters, since she was with the Dothraki when last we saw her.
• Davos Seaworth: During a lecture at Texas A&M University in 2013, Martin said that Osha would come back into the books. Last we saw him in A Dance with Dragons, Davos was heading to the island of Skagos to find Rickon, last seen departing with Osha in A Clash of Kings. The only reasonable person through whom we would encounter Osha would be Davos.
• Jon Connington: HBO didn’t just cut Jon Connington from the show — it cut his entire plotline. Nonetheless, back in 2011, Martin said that he would write the battle for Storm’s End, and as it stands, the only current POV character we could see that through is Jon.

And there are other major characters who are all but bound to have point-of-view chapters, characters like Jaime, Brienne, and Sam. And of course there’s Jon Snow, who remains dead on the page.

All told, that’s a potential 20 point-of-view characters in The Winds of Winter, more than ever before. (A Dance of Dragons had 18, a series high. A Game of Thrones only had nine.) And keep in mind that all of the other books have included a prologue chapter narrated by someone who dies at the end, which brings the potential total to 21. (A Dance of Dragons had both a prologue and an epilogue.)

So that’s a lot of people. How will Martin manage the sprawl? “I have a large number of important characters who I switch between to tell the entirety of the story, and that limits who I can kill,” he said in 2013. But now that those characters are coming together, he has “a lot more flexibility for killing people.” That’s always an option.

h/t Buzzfeed