Winter Is Coming

The Stark words are three: Winter is coming. Other houses praise themselves in their words. The Starks give a warning, and they mean it plainly.

In Westeros the seasons keep no calendar. A summer may last ten years and a winter longer, and no one can say when either will turn. The maesters of the Citadel watch the length of the days and send out white ravens when they judge that a season has changed. The North does not wait for the ravens. It lays in grain and salt meat through every summer.

As the story opens the summer has run for most of ten years. Children born in it have never known a true winter. Lord Eddard says the words anyway, as his fathers did, and the North remembers why.