Things are bleak: Cassie has gotten married and shows no signs of returning to Beyond Good and Evil; it's April and the weather is so bad that Keagan's bar regulars are either too bored or too warm at home to brave the sleet, rain and snow of mud season. Only Moon O'Brien stops in - rattled after a treacherous crossing of the Plains of Abraham. And then the call from Ireland comes; and Keagan's off without Niles and Teal. "It's too dangerous," he warns them. It's too dangerous for Keagan too because the IRA and its splinter groups consider him a traitor for quitting the Cause and immigrating to America; the loyalists who also have a whole raft of crazies under various alphabetic rubrics would like nothing better that to kill him. And even the Police Service of Northern Ireland retains more than a mild interest in him. Yet he has no choice, he has to go.