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Old Lutz Gessel is poor but he is proud. If he's hired a ragged two-legger for the winter to replace the good for nothing farmhand he had before, the man's going to wear a pair of boots in advance wages.
"Can we trust him?" Berta asks her sire. "Otto's an Outsider, there's no telling if he'll walk away with them. There'd be no one to ask about him, afterwards..."
Old Gessel shrugs. "True, but he's a two-legger as well, and their feet are tender. A hand of mine isn't walking about near barefoot all winter, if I can help it."
*
The farmer's daughter is much like her father: a haughty sort, but with a good heart. Otto works by their side and eats at their table, and there's never meat but he thinks nothing of that; he knows they are not rich. He knows to appreciate a master who treats him with kindness. He's had the other kind, as well.
But the girl is young, and she seems so lonely, living all alone here up the mountain slope, and her eyes turn brighter when he chats with her, or teases her like friends would. Such lovely eyes she has then.
*
Otto leans his axe against the chopping-block, and his shoulder to the shed wall to catch his breath a while. "My father's ploughhorse had a little colt with a sock just like yours, miss, before we lost the farm," he tells Berta. "High up to the knee on one hind leg. I fed him dry bread sometimes, and he'd follow me anywhere I went." He smiles at the memory.
Berta starts gathering the firewood. "A halfhorse colt would not have followed," she tells him. "Halfhorses can't be tamed."
What does it feel like, she wonders, to be a tame horse?
*
Spring sun casts stripes of gold on them through the barn walls, and she takes his hand in hers to cover it with kisses: on the base of his thumb, his knuckles, the bump of his folded-down fingers... She did not know a little two-legger man could feel like this.
Hardfeet do not marry wormtoes in the valley. It isn't done. But they're neighbours and they hold each other in respect. Otto said if people Outside knew he'd been with a halfhorse, they'd judge him no less than if she was a speechless horse-mare.
Then what does this make him?
*
Berta and her sire are glad to have hired a two-legger for the winter: they'd never known how little one of those would eat. But the spring will come and they'll want someone stronger for the field work.
When the snow melts, Otto will drift with the wind again. Take short jobs at the busiest times, and otherwise be poor but free. When he says it he's already telling her farewell with his eyes.
Berta knows that if she went with him, there'd never be a home for her, nor foals, nothing but a strange wide world that wouldn't understand.
*
Autumn winds cry in the corners of their cottage, and inside Old Gessel sleeps, but Berta keeps the hearth burning and listens: howls of the storm, branches beating against branches, against the walls. The knock and clatter that won't let up, that insists and demands, and she hears it's at the door.
Outside there's a two-legger man, dripping water from the brim of his hat, smiling too wide and his eyes too bright. "Is there a night's rest for a traveller in this house?" Otto asks. "Or work for a good man?"
She pulls him inside, and doesn't let go.
*
Old Gessel's daughter kept the house after him, with no one to help her but a two-legger farmhand. The same man for all those years, come to the house back when old Lutz still lived. People said Berta was too stingy to hire more help, and too stiff-necked to share the house and farm with a husband.
Some whispered other things, as well: that there was a master in that house, after all. But that was idle gossip without proof. Berta seldom came down from her mountain slope, and didn't need to care: she was poor, she said, but free.