About 6 minutes to read aloud.

The sky in the east had gone the colour of a duck's egg, pale grey with a seam of gold along the very bottom, and Santa knew what that meant. One house left. Less than an hour of dark to do it in, and the reindeer already knew it too.

Dasher's head hung low over the harness. Blitzen, who never once in nine hundred years had missed his footing, clipped a chimney pot on the turn over the last village and sent it clattering down into a garden, and nobody said anything because there was nothing to say. They had been out since the sun went down on the other side of the world, and the sleigh, which had been so heavy at the start of the night that it groaned on the runners, was light now, and still they were tired in the way that has nothing to do with weight.

The last house stood at the end of a lane with no other houses in it, a narrow place with a crooked gate and one window lit low and yellow near the ground. Santa brought the sleigh down slower than he needed to, because slow was all the reindeer had left to give, and the runners touched the roof so gently that not one slate stirred.

He expected what he always expects at a last house: a cold hearth, a stocking, a quiet room, and out again before the milk had time to go warm. What he found instead, when he came down the chimney and dusted the soot from his sleeve, was a boy sitting up in bed with a torch in his hand and the true and stubborn look of a child who has decided not to fall asleep tonight, whatever it costs him.

The boy did not shout. He did not reach for the torch to shine it in anyone's eyes. He simply looked at Santa the way a person looks at something they have been promised for a long time and are still slightly amazed to see arrive, and he said, in a voice gone hoarse with staying awake, "I thought you'd have finished by now. I thought I'd be the one you skipped."

Santa sat down on the end of the bed, which he does not often do, because there is not often time. "I don't skip the last one," he said. "The last one is the whole reason for coming out at all."

The boy considered this. Outside, one of the reindeer shifted its weight on the roof and a slate ticked against another, a small sound in a very quiet lane. "Are they tired?" the boy asked. "I heard them land funny."

"They're tired," Santa said, because there was no good reason to tell him otherwise. "They've been going a long time, and the night's nearly out, and they've still got the whole way home after this."

"Then you should go," the boy said, and he said it kindly, the way you say something you have worked out is true even though you would rather it wasn't. He lay back down and let the torch go dark in his hand.

Santa filled the stocking at the end of the bed, and it did not take long, because it never does once you know exactly what someone needs. At the door he looked back once. The boy's eyes were already closing, the fight gone out of them at last now that there was nothing left to stay awake for.

Outside, the sky in the east had gone from grey to a thin, real gold, and the lane was so quiet that Santa could hear the reindeer breathing before he saw them. He climbed up beside them, and for a moment nobody moved, sleigh and driver and eight tired animals sitting still on a roof at the edge of morning.

Then Dasher lifted his head, because there was one thing left to do and it was the going home, and the sleigh rose off the last roof of the night into a sky that was almost too light to fly in, heading north, toward the dark that was still holding on there, and toward sleep.