I am about to pull my hair out. This just does not make sense. In searching the archives for anything that could be related I found a post that stated that running the vlan(4) with the correct netmask and the carp(4) interface with /32 caused dhcp to work fine for them. I have done that and it has had no effect. Thanks for the response.
clueless conjecture: what's arp -a say? on either machine? where is your DHCP server running? on one of your two OpenBSD fw's? On one of the vlans? if I don't reply again, that'll mean I'm bamboozled and/or out of ideas