The third season of Game of Thrones debuted on Sunday, returning viewers to the epic and often heartbreaking fantasy world of the HBO drama. Wired spoke with Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Rose Leslie (Ygritte), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) and Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) about what fans have to look forward to this season.

Although the previous two seasons of the show have remained quite faithful to the plot of the original books by George R. R. Martin — give or take a few minor differences — Turner, who plays the eldest daughter of Ned Stark, warned that “[in] season 3, there are kind of bigger differences. The book readers will be super shocked.”

And while season three primarily depicts the events in the first half of the third novel, A Storm of Swords, Martin told Wired that “the divisions into novels is almost arbitrary. I’m writing one story that has a beginning and quite a lot of middle, and hopefully an end.”

The fans waiting with bated breath for the sixth and seventh novels in the Song of Ice and Fire series — estimated at around 1,500 pages a piece — remain hopeful indeed.