The show makes Jaime’s Season 4 gift to Brienne even more special by adding a suit of armor to the mix that he had made from memory of her measurements. It’s a gesture that proves that just as Brienne saw and accepted Jaime for who he was in the bathtub at Harrenhal, he saw her for who she truly was. “Jaime gives Brienne her equivalent of an amazing dress and a pair of shoes,” Christie said in a behind-the-scenes interview from Season 4. “He gives her a sensational suit of armor and a sword, he’s given her couture.”

And just as they do in the books, Jaime and Brienne part ways in Season 4 with the understanding that she will go and try to find and protect Sansa Stark. But here’s where the show’s adaptation hits a major stumbling block. The writers decided to cut the storyline involving Lady Stoneheart a.k.a. the resurrected Catelyn Stark in Season 4. They had their reasons, but George R.R. Martin has said it’s the one major adaptive choice he objects to. One of the biggest fallouts from this cut is that it leaves Jaime and Brienne at loose ends. In the books, their fate is tied up with Catelyn’s and the Riverlands.

So the show threw Brienne up North in pursuit of Sansa, with not a ton of ideas about what she should do once she got there. As Gwendoline Christie put it with polite frustration at a 2015 San Diego Comic-Con panel: “I had to stand for three months watching a window to wait for a candle.” Meanwhile Jaime was shipped off to rescue Princess Myrcella from Dorne in a tidy bit of storytelling reconstruction that wound up backfiring thanks to everything Dorne landing with a thud.

So Brienne hung around Sansa, helpfully, and Jaime continued to be trapped in Cersei’s increasingly wicked orbit long after the book version of the character left her for good. But they both stagnated without each other. Meanwhile the show tried to put the two together whenever it could whether it was their brief Season 6 meeting in the Riverlands, or their brief Season 7 meeting at the Dragonpit.

But the bottom line is thanks to that Stoneheart cut, the pair have been kept apart for much longer, it seems, than George R.R. Martin ever intended. In A Storm of Swords, Jaime passes out on a Weirwood tree stump and has a freaky prophetic dream about Brienne—even though he had just abandoned her back at Harrenhal with (unbeknownst to him) that bear.

This dream might wind up presaging Jaime’s final storyline on Game of Thrones. In it he sees himself in the Winterfell crypts—even though he doesn’t recognize where he is. Jaime dreams of Cersei and Tywin but when he asks why their father brought them there, his sister responds: “Us? This is your place, Brother. This is your darkness.” Winterfell is a place of reckoning for Jaime alone. A place where his past sins of flinging boys from towers, attacking Ned Stark, or killing King Aerys will come back to haunt him.

In the dream Cersei abandons Jaime there—just as she betrayed him in Season 7—and he’s left alone with a sword that flickers with a pale flame. Soon a naked Brienne joins him and he gives her a matching sword. Worth remembering that this dream sequence happened in the book before Jaime and Brienne were decked out with two halves of Ned Stark’s sword Ice. Martin loves planting those seeds early.

Together, in that dream and in the Winterfell crypts, Jaime and Brienne stand side by side swords out as “riders on pale horse [. . .] armored all in snow” arrive. Sound a lot like the White Walkers, no? In the dream, these are the ghosts of Jaime’s old dead knight friends as well as Prince Rhaegar. They accuse Jaime of kingslaying and attack him while Brienne stands firmly by his side: