About 6 minutes to read aloud.

The last lit window had gone an hour before, swallowed by cloud, and now there was nothing below the sleigh but water. It stretched black in every direction, with no moon to mark where the sea ended and the sky began, so that for a while it seemed the sleigh was standing still in the middle of nothing at all.

This was the part of the journey Santa Claus had come to know best, the long crossing between one coastline and the next, and he had learned not to mind it. The reindeer knew it too. Dasher and Dancer, who chattered over every rooftop in Norway, went quiet somewhere past the last lighthouse. Prancer stopped tossing his head. Even Blitzen, who liked the sound of his own hooves on a tin roof, settled into a steady, silent rhythm, and the only sound left in the whole wide dark was the runners cutting the wind.

Santa pulled his collar higher and watched the sacks behind him, their shapes gone soft and grey in the no-light. He could not see the sea, only feel it beneath them somewhere, cold and moving and enormous. A gull had followed the sleigh for the first mile out from land, calling once or twice, and then it too had turned back, because even a gull knows better than to fly this far from anywhere.

Cupid dropped a little in the harness, the way he always did over open water, and Santa clicked his tongue and Cupid lifted again, though neither of them said anything about it. There was nothing to say. It was simply the shape of this part of the night: quiet reindeer, a quiet man, and a great deal of dark passing beneath a pair of runners.

He thought, as he often did out here, of the houses waiting on the other side, still hours off, their chimneys cold and their children asleep, not yet knowing the sleigh was coming for them across all this water. It was a strange thing to carry, that knowing, out here where nobody could see him carry it. But it kept the crossing from feeling as long as it was.

Donner shifted his weight and the sleigh dipped very slightly, correcting itself a moment later, and somewhere far beneath them a wave broke against nothing that anyone could see. Vixen's ears flicked at a sound Santa could not hear, and then flattened again, and they flew on.

An hour is a long time to sit with only the wind for company, and Santa had learned to let his mind go loose the way the reins went loose in his hands, trusting the reindeer to hold the line even when he was thinking of something else entirely. He thought of the workshop, and whether the paint on the rocking horses had dried in time. He thought of a boy in a house not yet reached who had asked, in his letter, for nothing at all except that his grandmother's cough would get better, and Santa did not know what to do with a wish like that, only that he had read it twice.

Then, so slowly that he almost missed the moment it happened, the dark ahead began to change. It did not brighten so much as thin, the black easing to something closer to grey at the very edge of the world, and Comet's ears came up first, then Blitzen's, then all eight at once, because reindeer always know before anyone tells them.

A single light appeared low on the horizon, small and steady, the kind of light a lighthouse keeper leaves burning without ever thinking of who might be glad to see it. Santa watched it grow from a point to a small flame to something that was, unmistakably, a coastline, and felt the sleigh answer to it the way a compass needle answers to north.

The reindeer picked up their pace without being asked. Dasher shook his head and made a sound that was almost his old chatter, and Dancer answered him, and the runners rang out again over water that was no longer quite so black, because somewhere ahead of them, on solid ground, the first chimney of the next country was waiting with its cold hearth and its sleeping house, and the longest, quietest stretch of the whole night was, at last, behind them.