"What are You doing here?"

Jon II

This chapter is perhaps the penultimate "anti-Cat" chapter. It features our favorite bastard, Jon Snow, seeking a final audience with his comatose brother.

The mood in Winterfell is fairly dark at this time. Bran is lying, comatose and broken in bed. Catelyn has broken, and resorted to living in her son's room. Jon is leaving Winterfell forever, headed to the Night's Watch.

This is a relatively short chapter, and the main takeaways are as follows.

Jon describes Bran as a type of skeleton, a leaf, with bones "like a bird". This, I believe, is meant as a clear allusion to Bran's future as a greenseer, a skeleton sitting on a throne.  We'll get to Bran's future more in Bran's next chapter (to be expertly exegeted by James), but its clear from the many hints in Bran's chapters that his storyline is perhaps the most important in the series.

The second takeaway is Catelyn's speech, about her prayer to the Seven for Bran to stay in Winterfell, by any means possible. There is a lot of talk in the fandom that the Seven "don't have any power", compared to R'hollor, the Old Gods, and the other religions of Martin's world. I think Catelyn's statement is a kind of direct contradiction (among other things, like Lancel Lannister's prophetic visions) of this idea. The Seven do hear prayer, but like the other gods of Westeros (or ancient mythologies) they rarely answer them in the desired fashion.

The chapter ends with a scene the cements Jon's place in the readers heart, Jon Snow gifting Needle to his youngest sister Arya.