[Werthead]

Intriguingly, George was asked about this recently and he's still saying seven, with TWoW well underway. I know seven was on the cards long before AFFC was done and it formally went up, but it's still holding at seven now. This may be related to him recently saying that TWoW may only have 13 POV characters, which is a bit of a surprise as AFFC/ADWD left us with 19. That suggests possibly some POVs being benched for the book but more likely the congregation of POVs in the same place means that he doesn't need all of those POVs to cover the story any more.

If it does go to eight, I suspect now it'll be because #7 goes overlong and needs to be split, but this will be done after it is finished. That will still speed things up considerably if George doesn't need to go on extended book tours between volumes.