A stirring new trailer for the show’s penultimate season has been released – and most of the spats seem to be taking place in southern climes

We are now just 13 episodes from the great Game of Thrones finale, due some time in 2018, when all shall be revealed. Will it be bogus Queen Cersei’s head on a spike above the Red Keep’s Traitor’s Walk, or will Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister find themselves at the wrong end of a pointy stick? Could a new and unexpected pretender to the Iron Throne yet be primed to emerge? In the absence of Maggy the Frog to deliver credible predictions, we’ll have to make do with a stirring new trailer for the show’s penultimate season. Here’s what it taught us:

War has come to King’s Landing

All the talk may be of an ultimate showdown with the White Walkers, but most of season seven’s spats seem to be taking place in southern climes. Are we witnessing Cersei Lannister’s final downfall in the face of Daenerys Targaryen’s armies, transported to King’s Landing by the Greyjoy fleet borrowed by Theon and Yara at the tail end of last season? That shot of Jaime riding solo across a ruined battlefield, lance at the ready, certainly doesn’t look good for his house. Nor does the fact that Drogon is now the size of an Airbus.

The Night King is still hanging about north of the wall

So what’s going on in colder parts? Well, the White Walker big cheese the Night King still doesn’t appear to have come south, but you wouldn’t put it past him having made it as far as the newly snow-swept Winterfell. We know that Beric Dondarrion and the Hound were last seen travelling north, and the Brotherhood Without Banners’ undead leader certainly looks like he could come in useful in a zombie v zombie spat – especially with flaming sword in hand. GoT acolytes will be well aware that the great warrior Azor Ahai fought the original Walkers with a similar blade.

Somebody has built Bran a wheelchair

Bereft of Hodor’s tree trunk-like arms to carry him about the north, poor injured Bran Stark has needed a new mode of transportation for a while now. The question here is who in Westeros, especially north of the wall, possesses the technology to build him what appears to be a fully functioning wheelchair? The figure looming over the heir to Winterfell in a brief shot does not appear to be one of the diminutive Children of the Forest, so who is he?

Weird passion is budding for Missandei and Grey Worm

For a show so cheerfully obsessed with sex, Game of Thrones really is making a big deal out of a romance between two characters who are highly unlikely to ever get past first base. There’s something wonderfully poignant and sweet about Grey Worm and Missandei’s incessant shy glances and fluttered eyelashes. And if Tormund Giantsbane can get it on with Brienne of Tarth in the new season, then all bets are off. But this one still makes you want to shout “never gonna happen!” at the screen.

Sansa is not going to be sidelined

Last season’s fateful episode in which Sansa Stark fed her evil rapist husband to his own slavering hounds has certainly helped Sophie Turner’s increasingly confident noblewoman move up a few plinths in the grand pantheon of Game of Thrones fan favourites. But the prominence given to Ned Stark’s eldest daughter in the new trailer will surely have supporters of Jon Snow’s (admittedly pretty dubious) claim to the Seven Kingdoms wondering if they have placed their silver on the right northerner.

With Snow elevated to THE KING IN THE NORTH!, season seven always looked likely to be the moment when Sansa curtsied delicately and removed herself from centre stage. Yet here she is getting her own poetic soliloquy about lone wolves having to die to help the pack survive - a line surely replete with symbolism given Jon (and his direwolf Ghost) were never truly accepted as full members of the Stark brood. Meanwhile, Littlefinger is still whispering ambition in his one-time ward’s ear, and Game of Thrones simply wouldn’t be Game of Thrones without a little icy-hearted betrayal.

Game of Thrones season seven starts in the US on 16 July at 9pm on HBO, and in the UK on 17 July on Sky Atlantic at 2am, then repeated at 9pm.