Its a stepup switchmode power supply, the voltage across cout will be higher than the supply, anything up to 100's of volts.
Its not a wonderful design, if you run it without a load it'd probably ramp up the o/p voltage to the point cout blows up.
The inductor charges when the tranny is on, and then when the tranny turns off via the law of inducatnce the inductor will reverse the voltage across it and ramp it up to whatever voltage is required to maintain current through it, this is then conducted via the diode into and smoothed by cout.