Chapter 6: Drill and Discipline
The morning air in the training field bit with a clean, sharp cold that felt earned. It carried the scent of crushed pine needles and distant woodsmoke, undercut by the nervous sweat of twenty girls formed up in loose ranks. Eleanor stood slightly apart, her posture mirroring Sarge’s coiled readiness, yet her eyes held a different kind of assessment. She watched the new intake—the way Izzy’s jaw was already set in defiance, how Willow’s fingers plucked nervously at her shorts, the calculating gleam in Annie’s downcast eyes.
Sarge didn’t shout. Her voice, when it came, was a low, carrying rasp that sliced through the chatter. “Ladies. You think last night was about punishment? That was a courtesy. Today is about discipline. The difference is, discipline you carry with you. It’s in the muscle, in the breath, in the will to continue when every part of you screams to stop.” She paced, her boots imprinting the soft earth. Her riding crop tapped a rhythm against her thigh. “We’re going to play a game. Winners get pride. Losers get a reminder.”
The first drill was deceptive in its simplicity: lunges across the clearing, holding a medicine ball overhead. Failure to maintain perfect form meant a swift, stinging crack of Sarge’s crop across the back of the thighs. The initial snaps were met with yelps and stumbles. Clara, her dark hair sticking to her temples, took the first one with a sharp curse that earned her a second, harder strike.
“Language, Davies,” Sarge said, almost conversationally. “That one was for free.”
Eleanor moved through the ranks, her architect’s eye catching deviations. “Knee over toe, Juniper. You’re leaning.” Her hand came down, not with a crop, but with a firm, correcting press on the small of Juniper’s back. The contact was clinical, but Juniper flushed, a mix of shame and something else. She corrected her stance.
Annie, moving with a languid, deliberate grace next to Willow, let her form sag. She shot a look toward Sarge, a clear provocation. The crop landed with a report like a splintering branch. Annie hissed, but the sound was swallowed by a grimace that twisted into a strange smile. She straightened up, perfect.
“See?” Annie muttered to Willow, who was trembling beside her. “It’s just a sting. Don’t be such a mouse.”
Willow flinched, whether from the comment or the next near-miss of the crop, Eleanor couldn’t tell.
The obstacle course was next, a brutal confection of mud, rope, and timber. The rule was simple: the squad worked as a unit. The last team to finish would provide the evening’s entertainment. “Entertainment” here had a very specific, unspoken meaning.
Eleanor’s squad—Annie, Willow, Juniper, Skye, and Clara—eyed the course with varying degrees of dread. The other team, led by a fiercely competitive second-year, cracked their knuckles.
“Alright, listen up,” Eleanor said, pulling them into a huddle. The smell of their fear, sour and human, mixed with the cedar from their uniforms. “This isn’t about being the fastest individually. It’s about not leaving anyone behind. Willow, you’re light. Juniper, you’re strong. Get her over the wall first. Skye, you’re agile. Scout the best footholds. Clara, Annie—you two stop posturing and work the rope bridge. Anyone falls, everyone stops. Understood?”
They nodded, a brittle unity forming.
The whistle blew.
Chaos erupted. The world narrowed to the burn of lungs, the suck of mud, the rasp of rope against palms. Eleanor found herself in her element—directing, problem-solving, a general in a war of attrition. Juniper boosted Willow over the high wall with a grunt, Skye guiding her hands to the ledge. Clara and Annie, for all their friction, moved across the rope bridge with a synchronicity born of sheer stubbornness, their backsides offered up as tantalizing targets for Sarge’s crop if they slowed.
They were neck-and-neck with the other team at the final station: a broad, deep pit of mulch you had to crawl through on your belly, under a lattice of netting. The penalty for raising your back too high was a sharp, immediate swat from the waiting junior instructor stationed there.
“Go, go, go!” Eleanor urged, sliding in first. The mulch was damp, smelling of decay and earth. It filled her nostrils, coated her skin. She heard the rhythmic thwack-thwack of the paddle meeting its mark from the other tunnel, accompanied by stifled cries. Her own team crawled behind her, a train of labored breathing.
Then, a whimper. Willow was stuck, paralyzed, the netting catching on her shirt. “I can’t,” she sobbed, the weight of the course and the looming punishment crashing down.
Annie, just ahead, twisted back. Her face, smeared with dirt, was a mask of impatient fury. “Move, you idiot! You’re going to lose it for us!”
“Annie, shut up and help!” Juniper barked, shoving past to try and free Willow’s snag.
The seconds bled away. Eleanor could hear the other team emerging from their tunnel, a cacophony of gasped triumph. It was over. They’d lost.
Silence descended, broken only by the harsh sound of twenty girls trying to catch their breath. Both teams stood in the clearing, mud-smeared and spent. Sarge surveyed them, her expression unreadable. “Squad Two. Finishing time, seven minutes, forty-two seconds. Squad One… eight minutes, eleven seconds. A decisive victory.”
The winning team cheered, a ragged, exhausted sound.
Sarge turned to Eleanor’s squad. “You failed as a unit. You left a sister behind in the field. That has a price.” She gestured to a long, low bench that had been brought to the edge of the clearing. “Line up. Present. Let your victory gift remind you of your failure.”
The reality of it, cold and procedural, settled over them. This wasn’t the heated, private dynamic of the dormitory. This was public, official, and stark.
Clara went first, her rebellious facade gone, replaced by a weary resignation. She bent over the bench, presenting her already marked backside. The junior instructor, a girl named Tess with a strong arm, delivered ten methodical, heavy paddled strokes. Clara didn’t make a sound, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the bench.
Juniper followed, then Skye, each accepting their share with a quiet dignity that made Eleanor’s throat tighten.
Willow was crying before she even approached, her shame a palpable thing. “I’m sorry,” she whispered over and over to her teammates.
“It’s not just on you, Will,” Skye said softly, touching her shoulder.
But it was Annie who shattered the grim procession. When it was her turn, she sauntered to the bench with a roll of her eyes. “Whatever. Just get it over with.”
She assumed the position, but there was a theatricality to it, an exaggeration of the curve of her back that was meant to be seen. Tess raised the paddle.
Thwack.
The sound was solid, punitive.
Annie let out a giggle.
It was a high, strained, utterly inappropriate sound that cut through the heavy air. Tess paused, glancing at Sarge.
Sarge’s face hardened. “She finds her discipline amusing. Double the count. And someone else will administer it. Vance.”
Eleanor’s stomach dropped. All eyes turned to her. Annie’s head twisted, her green eyes wide with sudden, real fear, then blazing with betrayal. “You?”
Eleanor walked forward, her legs feeling foreign. She took the paddle from Tess. It was heavier than she expected, the wood smooth and dense. This was different from the hairbrush in the quiet dormitory, different from Mia’s silent offering. This was performance. This was rule.
“Count,” Sarge ordered Annie.
Annie buried her face in her arms. “One,” she mumbled.
Eleanor swung. The impact juddered up her arm. She found her rhythm, falling back on the clinical precision that governed her blueprints. Measure. Apply force. Assess result.
By “six,” the giggle was gone, replaced by hitched breaths. By “ten,” Annie was gripping the bench legs, her body taut. By “fifteen,” a low, broken sound escaped her with each blow. Eleanor’s own breath was coming fast, her heart a trapped bird against her ribs. She saw the vivid, overlapping blooms of color rising on Annie’s skin, a brutal mosaic.
She delivered the final stroke, the twentieth, with a force that left her own palm stinging.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the rustle of the oaks and Annie’s soft, shuddering weeping as she slowly, painfully, stood up. She didn’t look at Eleanor. She wouldn’t for the rest of the day.
Sarge gave a single, slow nod. “Dismissed. Clean up. Reflect.”
As the girls limped back toward the cabins, the winning team already joking with a relieved lightness, Eleanor stood alone in the clearing. The paddle hung heavy at her side. She looked at her hand, then at the retreating, hurt figure of Annie, and then at the distant tree line where the dormitory waited. The complex geometry of control and surrender she thought she understood had just been fractured, and the pieces were sharp enough to draw blood.