Rebellions are expensive to crush, and even at the best of times there is a risk that they will spread out of control and you have another full scale, full cost, war going on.
I suspect that you are right, the lunars use "deniable" tactics to selectively eliminate the biggest potential trouble makers. Sure, people might suspect that the lunars were behind what happened, but nobody can prove it, and he did have other enemies, and while he was prominent he wasn't king or anything like that, so maybe we'll all grumble, but the odds of actually risking our blood aren't high.
Unless of course some clever skald (or group of low entertainers) manages to make a martyr out of the poor saps that the lunars set up. Not that it would start a rebellion as such, but the next time something happens everyone will remember the last time.
If killing a tribal king didn't provoke outright rebellion, for sure the memory of it would last and be immortalized in story and poem, and would make rebellion much, much, more likely in the future. Mind you, I think by far the likeliest thing the lunars could do would be to ratchet up the taxes on the tribe involved even higher, until the tribe replaced the king with one more willing to cooperate with the lunars.
Just my $0.02.
--Bryan
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