About 7 minutes to read aloud.

There is a stretch of the night, somewhere between the last coast of one country and the first light of another, when the sleigh runs on nothing but sky. No rooftops below. No chimneys, no lamplit windows, no dogs barking at a sound they cannot place. Just the sea, black and moving, and the sleigh going forward through cold that has no smell of woodsmoke in it at all.

Santa had crossed this water more times than he could easily count, and he still did not like it much. Not out of fear. Out of the particular loneliness of it, the way the runners sounded different over open water than they did over land, thinner somehow, as though the sound had further to travel before it found anything to bounce off.

The reindeer knew this part too. They always went quiet here, the eight of them, no jostling, no huffed breath through the cold, no small competitive bursts of speed. Even Dasher, who liked to test the harness on a clear stretch just to feel Santa correct him, kept his pace steady and even and asked nothing of anyone.

"Comet," Santa said, because the quiet had gone on long enough that he wanted to hear a voice, even his own. "How far to the coast now."

Comet's ears turned back, just slightly, the only answer he had time for. Comet always ran lead on the long water crossings, because Comet did not spook at open dark the way some of the younger ones once had, and because Comet had a sense for how far a thing was even when there was nothing to measure it against.

The truth was that Santa knew the answer already. He had made this crossing enough times to feel roughly where they were by the cold alone, by the particular way it settled into the sleigh's runners and into his own hands on the reins. But knowing it and feeling it were two different things, and just now the knowing was losing the argument. The night felt longer than it should have. Stretched, somehow, the way a held note stretches past where a listener expects it to end.

He looked behind him once. The sack sat where it always sat, half its shape now, the rest already delivered into houses that were, by now, hours and an ocean away. Sleeping children in them who did not know yet what the morning held. That was usually enough to carry a man through the quiet part of the night, the thought of all those mornings waiting to happen. Tonight it was not quite enough on its own, and he could not have said why.

"It only feels long," he said, to nobody in particular, though Blitzen's ear flicked as if he had heard it and had an opinion he was keeping to himself. "It is the same crossing it always is."

Saying it aloud helped, the way saying a thing aloud sometimes does, not because it changes anything but because it puts the thought somewhere outside your own head where you can look at it properly. The crossing was the same length it had always been. The dark did not go on longer over water than it did over land. It only felt that way because there was nothing along the way to mark the going, no church spire passed and left behind, no known bend in a known river, nothing but the sleigh and the sound of the runners and the cold doing what the cold always did at this hour.

He thought of the first crossing he had ever made this way, so long ago that the reindeer then had been different reindeer, and how an old hand who had shown him the route had said something he still remembered: that the sea crossing was not really the hard part of the night, only the part with nothing to hide the size of it. Every night has this stretch in it somewhere, the old hand had said, even the shortest ones. You only notice it out here because there is nothing else to notice.

Ahead, low and small and easy to miss if he had not been watching for exactly that, a light appeared. Not a house light and not a star. A lighthouse, its beam turning slow and patient over water that had, until that moment, held nothing to turn it towards.

Dancer saw it first, or felt the change in Santa's hands on the reins, and picked up half a step. The others followed, not suddenly, but the way a held breath is let out, gradually and then all at once, until the sound of the runners changed pitch and the whole sleigh seemed to lean forward into the last part of the dark.

Santa did not say anything more. There was nothing that needed saying. The light grew, the way lights do when you are moving towards them and not simply watching them from a fixed place, and somewhere beyond it, though he could not see it yet, was a coastline with its rooftops and its chimneys and its sleeping houses waiting to be found one at a time.

The reindeer ran on, quiet no longer, and the longest stretch of the night became, as it always eventually did, simply the part of the journey that came before the next one.